The Founder Formula

Evan Macmillan - Co-founder of Gridspace

• Trace3 • Episode 27

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If you’re not using video to communicate your message, odds are that you’re missing a huge array of potential investors, consumers, and users. And before you make excuses about your company not being exciting, or your product not sexy enough for video, take a listen to this episode of The Founder Formula.

This week we're talking to Evan Macmillan, CEO and Co-Founder at Gridspace, an AI-driven, voice automation company. Evan has an incredibly rich background. He was born in Silicon Valley, and his dad worked at Sun Microsystems and rubbed shoulders with legends like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, I mean, we really strive to build an engineering paradise. And I think companies that understand the kind of paradise they're trying to build are more successful.

Intro:

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. We're

Todd Gallina:

Thrilled to have you with us. Episode 27 of the Founder Formula. With me today is Chief Technical Officer of Trace3, Tony Olczak. Tony, how's it going, man?

Tony Olzak:

Going awesome. Just in here, sheltered from the cold. This polar vortex, or whatever they're calling it, is coming through. Nice and toasty in my COVID cave. It's the perfect area to co-host a podcast. Tony, do you

Todd Gallina:

notice anything different?

Tony Olzak:

I did notice that subtle sultriness in your voice seems a little enhanced this week. Yes,

Todd Gallina:

I

Tony Olzak:

have a

Todd Gallina:

new mic. My mic matches your mic now. Wow. I wonder if it doesn't sound as good as mine.

Tony Olzak:

We can have a viewer, we can have a listener contest to decide. I think we're going to have a lot of those viewer versus listener comparisons in this podcast. Inside joke for later. So what's new with you, Todd? Nothing. I

Todd Gallina:

sent you a package, Tony. Yeah, I

Tony Olzak:

got it. That was a nice Christmas surprise. Yes, perhaps you'd like to share with the listeners what it is exactly you got in the mail. So I get a surprise package, not expecting anything from Todd Galena. And lo and behold, inside is our favorite beverage startup, Liquid Death. How amazing is this? This can is awesome, by the way. Not that anyone can see it, but if you could see it, it is

Todd Gallina:

amazing. For those of you who might not know what we're talking about, in a previous episode, we Tony and I reported on the funding of a company that pretty much makes water in a can. It's called Liquid Death. They got $33 million. And we were a bit skeptical. That was the point of why we were talking about it. But then lo and behold, it showed up where I live and now is exclusively sold at Whole Foods,

Tony Olzak:

which... It's got to be a get for him, right? Oh, it's got to be an amazing deal. And, you know, I got to tell you, this has been sitting in my pantry for two months. This can looks so good. I have to drink this. The anticipation has been killing me. And I do love sparkling water, so I'm really looking forward to this. Are we going to do an on-air taste-off? I'm down. Okay, but you open first so

Todd Gallina:

we don't both open at the

Tony Olzak:

same

Todd Gallina:

time.

Tony Olzak:

All right, I'm going to see if you can hear this. I've got it ready. Yeah.

Todd Gallina:

People who are just tuning in are like, what kind of podcast is this? All

Tony Olzak:

right. You ready? Yeah, let's do it. Three, two, one, go. Wow. From the Austrian Alps, you know, the flavor of this sparkling water, I literally can feel like I'm hiking and tasting strudel at the same time. It totally is an authentic Alps experience.

Todd Gallina:

Straight from the Alps to a cannery in Los Angeles, I think. That's awesome. I drink sparkling water all the time. This is actually really good. Yeah, I could mix this in. For sure. And for those of you who don't know, the can design, like Tony said, it's awesome. From a design and branding perspective, Liquid Death might be on top.

Tony Olzak:

Liquid Death, it just murdered my thirst. We proceed to just

Todd Gallina:

drink the whole can. You won't hear anything. Just drinking. That's awesome. Yeah, while we're enjoying this beverage, I wanted to... kind of give a quick update on a previous guest and get your thoughts on them. So Tim Delisle is the founder of Datalog, and they were in the news just this last week because they did get acquired, and surprisingly, they were acquired by a pretty well-known consumer brand, Nike. Yeah, that was big news. Yeah, so when somebody kind of enters this business, they're in the data information space and they're selling to enterprise businesses. Sometimes you see maybe a larger competitor pick them up. But I think for me, at least from my perspective, this is the first time I've ever seen someone purchase outright by potentially what could be just like a super large customer of theirs.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, it's really interesting. We're actually seeing... a trend where a lot of very large organizations are reserving money for even their own venture funds or just this purpose, which is if every company's future is a digital one and you're a digital company first, then acquiring interesting startups who can help you move the needle creates not just advantage for you, but advantage for you in your market, because now you've eliminated the ability for competitors to get into space as well. And I don't think this is like an outlier. I think we're going to see a little bit more of this to come. Yeah,

Todd Gallina:

that's interesting. And basically, they separate themselves from their competition. Nike's got to be far and away a leader in their space. But yeah, they're going to have a huge competitive advantage.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, I mean, when you just think about what Datalog does... And for those of you who haven't listened to that last podcast, I mean, to put it simply, they basically allow you to keep data in place. You know, many organizations have data all over the place, many different platforms and systems that's collecting different kinds of data, but they allow you to combine all that data in real time and stream it into real time insights and, you know, have machine learning algorithms that look for privacy, compliance, you know, protective measures that you need to take. And as the world becomes much more regulated around how we treat consumer data, those who can do this the best are going to have a significant advantage. So, you know, Kudos to Nike for the move. I think it was a smart acquisition. Congrats to the Datalog guys for the new win and the new scenario and what they're going to be working on next. But I think it's exciting for Nike for sure and definitely don't see this as the end of that kind of activity. It'd be exciting to see how that kind of stuff continues to unfold.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, with maybe some of the other folks that we have on the show. When you talk about traditional targets to acquire data, companies that are where we're speaking with them at their level of their journey, this kind of adds a new potential dance partner that maybe they hadn't thought of in the past.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, you know, you do see a lot of startups who are in earlier stages get picked up by someone. I mean, that's when you'll see consolidation happen, platforms beginning to assemble, or like your classic technology bigs, you know, pick up somebody to take their IP and turn it into the next big thing for themselves. Corporations picking off these companies. certainly isn't unheard of. But as they continue to build more venture funds themselves and back early stage companies, I think what we're seeing too is that the opportunity for this is going to open up a little bit because Last year, we saw more money raised than ever before. And that money is considerably being funneled towards late stage companies that the VCs are making big bets on. And so as that funding goes to those more mature companies that they feel have really great shots at healthy exits and capturing market share into whatever comes next, whether it's healthcare or things that are really trending right now due to the current state of the world, you're going to have a lot of early stage companies who find themselves in this weird spot. to where maybe the market's just not ready for what they're trying to do, or maybe the bets just aren't the same for where they are in their life cycle versus where the world is at and what they're ready to consume. And you might find yourself in a situation where a corporate type of acquisition makes the most sense. I mean, I think everybody has a different path. That's why we ask the question on the show about exit strategy sometimes. But yeah, kudos to those guys and good luck to them in the future. Good move on Nike's part for sure. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Todd Gallina:

Okay. So is it your intent to have this can finished by the end of our interview today? It's already done.

Tony Olzak:

The question becomes like, what do I do with this can now? I mean, I almost want to collect it. I mean, it certainly can be recycled, but... It literally says recycle or die on the back. So there you go. That's what I'm going to do. I think you just answered your own question. I answered that question.

Todd Gallina:

That's awesome. All right, man. Let's get to our guest. You ready? Let's do it. Okay. Okay. Joining us today is an entrepreneur and two-time co-founder. His first company was Zappity, which was a payments technology company that was eventually acquired by Groupon. His current company is Gridspace, which is an AI-driven voice automation company located out of San Francisco. Please welcome to the show, Evan McMillan. Evan, welcome to the show, man. Hi.

Evan Macmillan:

Hey, how's it going? Good to be here.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah. Hey, Evan, real quick before we get started. Did you know that your name is featured in a video game? No, I hope it's a good video game. When we were doing a little, we do a little bit of research all the time when we, you know, guests are coming up, want to make sure we're prepared. And I happen to stumble across your name and I'm like, I don't think that's the same guy. Long story short, you happen to be featured in, your name happens to be featured in an indie horror game. Let me Google this. Where you're like one of the 20 villains that you have to fight in that game. So I didn't know if you were aware. Okay,

Evan Macmillan:

well, as long as I'm on the boss level, I'm

Tony Olzak:

okay with it. Yeah, you're one of the

Evan Macmillan:

bosses, so at least that's a good compliment. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's quite the doppelganger. Okay, so on that note, guys.

Todd Gallina:

Well, you know, what's even funnier is that what we just learned about Evan is that he's never Googled himself. It's literally the first thing. Which leads us to my next question. Is this really Evan or is this a robot right now? We just need to double check.

Evan Macmillan:

No, it's not a robot. It's really me. And we're just reinforcing this Google result now with this podcast.

Tony Olzak:

You're totally welcome. Well, now that we have that out of the way, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today. Really excited to have you. Super stoked about your company, what you guys are doing, and also having you on the show and getting some of your insights. To kick this thing off, we would love if you could tell us a little bit more about GridSpace and just why you started it.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, absolutely. So, GridSpace has been a passion project that's now a company and we're super excited to be working with Trace in our growth stage. Really easiest way to understand the company, we make software that scans and automates primarily voice calls for really large contact centers. I've been interested in this problem for a really long time. I always thought it was a little strange that we had software for all these facets of our life, but this conversation piece of it, we could never get right. We could never sort of bring the sort of detail and data from a human-to-human conversation with a business into the other workflows that we have to deal with in our businesses. So it was a long time in the making, but it's a really exciting time for audio right now. I mean, I think you can see it in every corner of the market, from what's happening in audio social networking to podcasting you know, podcasts like this to the enterprise. So it's just a really exciting time for audio.

Todd Gallina:

That's great. Yeah. From what we've seen, it's pretty unbelievable of what the software can do and what your company can do. But before we get into more of that, I think our listeners would be super interested in hearing a little bit more about what it was like to grow up in the Silicon Valley. We have a lot of people on the show who eventually ended up there. From what I can understand and from our previous conversations, like In some places, it's cool to make the varsity football team, but where you grew up, it's even cooler to start a company out of your garage.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, so I was born in Mumlow Park area in the mid-80s. It was a time when poor graduate students like my parents could rent a house and eventually buy a house. It was a time when some really cool companies were moving from an idea to a first product to a handful of customers on the same street as some kooky gift stores and kooky food places. So it was not the Menlo in Palo Alto as we know it today. It was in the process of becoming that, but we didn't know it at the time.

Todd Gallina:

Well, were you hearing about some of these people that were, you know, launching huge successes out of your area? I mean, obviously, you know, Jobs and Wozniak had already happened, but...

Evan Macmillan:

You know, my parents were pretty low-key. My dad worked, you know, they were graduate students, and then my dad worked... in M&A for Sun Microsystems, which was a pretty cool company. I didn't really know much about it until I was a little bit older, but they were building the machines behind the internet. They were the dot and dot com. And my dad... He wasn't the founder of Sun, and I don't remember his employee number, but he was a pretty amazing guy. And he was meeting guys like Gates and Jobs and, you know, kind of at the intersection of a lot of these really cool people. deals that kind of made the valley happen. And I didn't really learn about that until a little bit later, but that was in the water. That was kind of going around in my house. And I think these initial conditions end up putting you on certain paths. So you don't realize it until later, but I'm sure that had a lot to do with where I ended up later on in my life.

Todd Gallina:

Which is Stanford, right? You spent some time there. I'm sure there are some pretty smart people there as well.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah. So started in Menlo. Your parents kind of airlifted us to Colorado. My grandmother lived in Colorado. So most of my grade school was in Colorado. And that was a really good thing because there were backyards and people not talking about technology all the time. And Colorado was like the headquarters of Red Robin. So it was not Silicon Valley day in and day out, which was kind of cool. I had a little exposure to that. And then, you know, in Colorado, some of that exposure went away. And then, yeah, eventually came back to Stanford, didn't study computer science, ended up studying product design, which was pretty cool. And the product design program has spawned some interesting companies lately, like some pretty addictive companies, you could say, like Juul and Snapchat. But some really great ones The other addictive was Clover. I don't know if you ever had a Clover coffee at Starbucks. That was a Stanford. No. So got to work with a really talented group of engineers and product designers. And a couple of them became co-founders of GridSpace a few years after school. So it was a good place to be.

Tony Olzak:

Well, let's riff on that for a second. So, you know, with that kind of DNA in your own family with experiences out of the valley, did that make it easier when it came time to put your first startup and the whole process of trying to pitch to the VCs and to get it off the ground?

Evan Macmillan:

Yes and no. I mean, I think it was really, really important to know that that was possible at an early age. So knowing that, you know, you could have an idea and make a prototype and share it with a friend and that friend may like get involved and then share with another friend and they may give you some money to make a better prototype. Knowing that that was possible was really important. I don't know if it made it completely easy. I mean, I think you graduate from school and a lot of kids have a really rude awakening. I had kind of a rude awakening and you realize that you haven't really done anything for anybody. You haven't proven that you can do anything. And that's what the world cares about. It's like, what have you accomplished? What is your track record? And you graduate from school and your track record is... you know, graduating from school or whatever you did alongside of school. So you graduate and you don't really have a network of people that know that you can do something. So you have to kind of build that from scratch. And, you know, it took a little while and you're still building that record every day. So you're still showing that you can do something interesting with the team and, you know, with the money that, you know, folks can trust in your projects So it's, you're always kind of proving yourself, I think. And that's

Tony Olzak:

true everywhere, but it's especially true in the Valley. Well, so when you think about the people that you met in school, I think, and I think you mentioned this a little bit earlier, did your founding team and maybe at your first startup versus, you know, the grid space piece, how many of those people came out of your experience from school? And, you know, like how important is that to go to a school that has the kinds of people that you might want to go into business with later?

Evan Macmillan:

I think it was interesting. I think I was part of this last group of kids that went to school because they were really excited about making products or computer science or some of these applied engineering disciplines. And around the time I was graduating, folks like Mark Zuckerberg got really famous and people started going to these kinds of schools because not because they were really interested in computer science or product design, because they wanted to be these tycoons. So I think something changed a little bit towards the end of my career. But a lot of folks I went to school with, they went to school because they really liked computers or they really liked designing things or they really liked political science. They didn't necessarily want to be the president. They just really liked it. So I think there was this thicker band of really high conviction engineers and product designers and scientists before everybody knew what everybody else was doing. So that's the thing that changed. And now, you know, you see the numbers, the enrollment numbers in computer science and there's just They're surreal. I mean, it's the biggest major at all these schools. And I think there's still a band of really high conviction computer scientists that truly like building things on the weekend. But there's also a lot of folks that are going into this field because they want to be Mark, I guess. It's a little different than it used to be. Everybody's kind of up in everyone's business now.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah. Shifting gears just for a second. Back to grid space for a second. We saw a video you guys produced at our company kickoff a couple of weeks back. And you've got a really interesting video on your website right now, which kind of depicts the technology from the perspective of someone actually consuming it and using it. And Todd and I meet with founders all the time. And one of the things that we see in kind of new tech pitches all the time is that people spend so much time talking about the technology versus actually just showing how you might use the technology. I'd love to hear a little bit more around the background of your guys' thought process on the videos and if that rolls into the way that you guys think about how to market the product and just really where that came from.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, for sure. So they set up the video that you're not going to see on this podcast. I promise. Let me just, let me tee this up guys, because you're not going to see it. Well, I can even rewind a little bit more. So we're in LA and LA is, it's just this incredible city and the amount of talent, entertainment talent in LA is surreal. So quick story. We have our holiday party every year. And, you know, before, before COVID, we decided we're going to have a magician come to our holiday party. And we had probably 50 applications from incredible magicians to be the magician at our party. And the magician we selected was Jason Alexander's favorite magician. And he was extremely affordable and incredibly talented. And that's just LA. It's just the amount of entertainment talent is surreal. So the quality of our videos benefit from being shot in LA with LA talent. But I think the thing that was so cool about... we had two sort of really cinematic videos for our two products, Grid Space Sift and Grid Space Grace. Grace was our first video that we did. It's about a conversational virtual agent that... Yeah, absolutely. won't translate to a few minute long video. So it really forces you to put that capability into visual storytelling frame, a visual way that people can understand. So in our first race video, there's this guy and he is in the backseat of a Tesla and he's taking care of this credit card. situation he had. He had a big night out and lost his credit card. And Grace walks him through the entire transaction. And you see split screen all of the actions being taken on his account by this virtual agent. It's pretty cool. And then in our next video, we create this energy company that has an outage and is using our software to resolve the problem with their solar panel product in real time with our software. And it was really through these videos, these were towards the end of our product development process, that we got the story right for our first customer. So I highly recommend videos to entrepreneurs as ways to clarify their own thinking and clarify their own messages to their audiences. There's nothing like it.

Tony Olzak:

It was really, really powerful. And, you know, we're frequently from our research team's perspective, you know, meeting with founders, lots of new startups every single week and doing some kind of evaluation of, you know, wherever they are in the process. And I got to say, I feel like if they went through that same process that you guys did, it would force them to be able to communicate the idea in ways that maybe they're just not prepared to do because it's in their head and you kind of get, you're so in it that you don't really realize how a consumer might need to see it. And it was just spectacular. I mean, kudos to you guys for a job really well done.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, thanks. And I think the other thing it does, guys, is if you have to make a video about what you're doing, I think it pushes you to do something a little bit bigger and a little bit cooler. If you're making the... And there's nothing wrong with some of these really niche products, but if it's accounting software for dog walkers... You know, you might want to go bigger than that, you know, if you have to actually put it into a video form at some point. So I think it pushes you to bigger and more ambitious product ends when you have to visualize it. Yeah, and it's limitless. You can really

Todd Gallina:

do anything. I mean, creativity, budget, absolutely play a big part into it. But yeah, you know, humans like to consume videos. That's how we like to learn things right now. And like Tony said, it was really great. Did you say that it was the production company that guided you in, forced you to ask questions that maybe you wouldn't have asked? Or was there somebody between you and the production company?

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah. So when you're, I mean, it's a collaborative effort, right? So you have this entire conversation that has to take place for, you know, a technical product to be visualize in that kind of format. And it's a collaborative effort. There's no way around it. I mean, I think companies sometimes have tried to hire studios to come in and explain what it is they do. And the results kind of speak for themselves. It tells the wrong story or it feels off. And I think ours turned out so well because... It was really this deep collaboration between our engineering team that was building the software that powers the video and these incredibly talented Hollywood types.

Todd Gallina:

That's great. You know, it's funny, this whole story started somehow with the magician that was Jason Alexander's favorite magician. And Tony, I was wondering how much Jerry Seinfeld's favorite magician would have cost. It probably would have been way more.

Evan Macmillan:

Probably more than our 20, what was it, 2019... Magician

Tony Olzak:

budget. I thought you were going to say you had David Blaine show up and he made the real grid space period of thin air.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah.

Evan Macmillan:

How is he doing these days?

Todd Gallina:

He's in a box above LA and a clear box just sitting there. I think just kidding. That was one of his weird, weird tricks that he did. It's the only one I can remember, but I see, I see billboards of him all the time when we go to Vegas and I'm, I've never been. You've never been to Las Vegas? No, I've never been to a David Coyne show. Tony and I are always in Vegas. We can't help ourselves. Got it. That's right. So you start this company and you're off and running. You've got some great marketing assets. We just talked about them. And now you have to start thinking about scaling. Do you want to share with our audience maybe the hardest part? about scaling?

Evan Macmillan:

The hardest part about scaling, I mean, when you have a really talented technical team, I think, you know, you get that right with the team. You know, you have a great team and you build a product in the right way and the scaling piece, there's a process, but I don't think that's hard. I think scaling your culture and, you know, getting that message to the people The folks that are not necessarily on the other line with a founder, that's the hardest kind of scaling, especially in our noisy world. But the technical scaling piece, at least for our company, that has come fairly easily. So we're very lucky there.

Todd Gallina:

Our founder, he interviewed every candidate that he brought on board. And at some point, he just couldn't do it anymore. Is there anything similar with you? At one point, did you stop interviewing candidates?

Evan Macmillan:

We're really good at delegation. So we have our lanes. And in my last company, I was responsible for product and engineering. The CEO let me do that. So that was really helpful. And I let him deal with some of the CEO things. And we have a really good division of The vision of responsibility is a grid space. And, you know, that means that certain people have more votes on candidates than others when those folks are touching on their sort of areas of work. I think it's really, really important to... It's like after you hire someone, you're on their team. So you want to make them as successful as possible. It's not... Yes, the selection piece is really important, but... the next part is in some ways even more important because a really, really great person isn't going to click with the team unless the team kind of clicks into that person really fast. So we've worked a lot on that recently, and it's been more challenging during this kind of remote work time, but we're finding ways around it.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, and it's interesting on that note. We've done the same thing where it's– We've, I think it's the first time we've hired people that we've literally never met in person before. I mean, at no point in the process, because even then, like you might still fly people out and when California is completely shut down and there's nowhere to fly to, you just don't do it. Hey, you mentioned something there on the culture side about, you know, scaling culture and then how you guys try to get new employees to, you know, groups to kind of adopt them and be interested in their success. This being your second startup, are there things that you've learned along the way and through the years that you've been doing grid space of how you look at culture now versus then and any valuable lessons that you think would be valuable to pass on?

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah. I mean, we really strive to build an engineering paradise. And I think companies that understand the the kind of paradise they're trying to build are more successful. So we really want to be a center of speech and language understanding excellence. We want to be the absolute number one destination for every engineer in the world that wants to work on the hardest, most interesting speech and language challenges. understanding problems with the coolest customers at the biggest scale. And that focus from the founding team makes it really easy to get a lot of things right. It means that the next person we bring on has to make everyone else feel like they're still part of this senator of excellence, and it helps us get rid of a lot of the things that those really excellent people don't want to waste time on. So we don't do everybody's laundry. Other companies do that. But we put a lot of systems in place that make things kind of invisible that other companies don't address. So we really want your time with us to go to doing excellent work. You know, we want to be the, I don't want to say like the Four Seasons, but we want to be a nicer version of the Four Seasons for really excellent engineers and product designers and sales professionals. But we started by figuring out what that is for engineers. And, you know, we've learned how to be that for product designers. And I think we're still kind of learning how to do that with, you know, other kinds of professionals. I don't think we're totally there yet.

Todd Gallina:

It's the W Hotel. I'm going to just throw it out there. Will you? Okay. Well, if you're starting to build an engineering paradise, I agree. It's not the Four Seasons. It's got to be something a little bit cooler. What is that

Evan Macmillan:

right now?

Todd Gallina:

It's probably

Evan Macmillan:

not a hotel anymore.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah. Tony's the coolest guy of the three of us. Maybe Tony can tell us. Where do you

Tony Olzak:

vacation, Tony? When I used to live in California, you kind of... you're in paradise every time you walk out your front door, right? So you kind of have to up the bar and different kinds of things. Now that I'm trapped in the middle of winter in Evan, your old hood, I'm up in Colorado now. I'm actually getting that bug where I'd be willing to vacation just back in California. So I think it always is perspective of whatever you're feeling on a daily basis.

Todd Gallina:

You come to the montage. The montage is pretty nice. Montage is pretty nice. Okay. All of a sudden, this show became a hotel commercial. I don't know why. Evan, one of the things that we love to ask is we ask founders about gratifying customer experiences, right? You spend your whole time, you build this amazing company. It's got a lot of buzz. Have you had an interaction with the customer that made you kind of stop and think like, wow, yeah, that's why I got into this?

Evan Macmillan:

Gosh, there's been a lot of those. I think there's a point in... a customer relationship where it doesn't it's like you're friends and you're on the same team and you've been through some ups and downs together. And I mean, there's been so many like cool memories, like go to terrible pizza places with our customers, like loud children and talking about, you know, how we're going to get this like next model into production. And it's just like, you know, that this is not a customer experience. relationship this is like somebody that's you know part of your team so we have we have relationships with a number of our customers like that and i think that's what's really cool about engineers too is they don't get caught up in all of that other stuff as much. Not to say that they don't sometimes, but I think when you have a really talented engineering team inside a customer and the Gritsby's team and they hang out with each other and they collaborate and they get our software in production and everything's running and then they build the next thing together and then we have an idea or they have an idea, those moments have been the coolest moments for me. I mean, being in the personal vehicles of your customers is a turning point for me. When we're driving together in a car that's not like a taxi, the relationship is such that we leave the company together and we drive to another location. That's special. I mean, one of the senior executives I worked with at a financial service company, we rode a train together for... two hours to that was in two hours like an hour maybe to her neighborhood in new york and we're just like on this train this commuter train and just moments like that are are pretty unforgettable because you know it's not a it's transcended the software customer relationship that's great that's awesome

Todd Gallina:

right now the train looking out the window

Evan Macmillan:

yeah made it We made it. Yeah.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah.

Tony Olzak:

We actually, uh, used to have hiring rules at trace three of like imagining that scenario. Would you sit with this person on a commuter train for an hour, you know, in order to hire them because it better be somebody you can get along with and make sure that that's the case when you're hiring more talent.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, totally. So yeah, we look for people that can, that we want to ride trains with and, uh, We click with customers that want to ride trains with us, and that's the best you can do, I think.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah. Be on a long train ride with someone. Hey, when it comes to competition, and I'm not sure how much competition you guys actually have in the space you're currently in, but how important is, in your opinion, to track who they are, what they're doing? Is it a concern at all? I mean, how do you guys think about the competitive landscape?

Evan Macmillan:

I mean, there's kind of two schools of thought. on competition in general. There's the Oracle sort of school of thought where you have like a party when a competitor loses. It's like a celebration when you beat a competitor somehow. And then there's more of the Peter Thiel school of thought where competition is for losers, right? And that if you're in a situation where somebody is seriously comparing you to the other vendor that looks like you, you've already lost. And I think that... it really depends what you're working on. Certain projects, I think the Peter model is the right model and other projects, I think the Oracle model is the right model. In our world, we're more in the Peter model where we need to be doing something that has nobody else doing anything like it for us to matter. And we're doing our best every single day to make sure that you can't get what we're doing from everything anyone else around and if somebody catches up the last thing we did well you know we better be 10 steps ahead on that next thing i don't know what do you guys think what do you guys think about competition do you like it what podcast are we competing against this week is this podcast like it's on its own plane We were describing video on this podcast.

Tony Olzak:

That is a whole new level. We're getting roasted on our own show. It's like we're like mama birds feeding the food to someone else because they can't see the video. We get to spend all day describing it over audio.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, exactly. So he's like wearing this suit. He has like a scruffy pepper beard. Yeah. There's this banking transaction that happens about 30 seconds in. See, everybody wants to watch

Tony Olzak:

the video on it now. Got to add some tense background music and then we're all done.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah,

Tony Olzak:

cool. We have

Todd Gallina:

no competition in the space of podcasts that describe videos. We own that space.

Evan Macmillan:

You know, you can get too caught up in, you know, pretending that you have no competition or caught up in pretending that you have a lot of competition, I think it's really more interesting to think about the customer and the customer problem and how do you make the customer the hero. And a lot of our work, so we build this engineering paradise, but our engineers are never the heroes of the story. Our customer is the hero of our stories. And in our world, It's always about finding ways to make our customer save the day, be the hero in their organization with awesome tools and capabilities that we engineer that most of the time they can't get from any other company on earth. And when we're doing our jobs, the customer is not necessarily problem free, but they're making faster, more furious progress through whatever organizational challenges they face because they're working with us and they're working with software that we built over the last, you know, almost eight years. So we try to think more about the customer as opposed to who's nipping at our heels or who's not nipping at our heels because we built something so special.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, there's no right answer, but that's the closest one to the right answer. It's the one we hear most often. And just quickly, I just wanted to respond to your question as it relates to us, if you're talking about Trace 3, and Tony can add way more color to this, but the only time I think about them is is when a customer happens to mention them. Do you know what I mean? I don't think we spend a lot of time looking right and left, but Tony, do you have some more color on that?

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, no, we subscribe to the same model. Our niche is innovation and emerging solutions, and we feel like nobody does that better than we do for the space that we're in. And so we kind of subscribe to that same thing, which is by the time everyone else does that, we better be on to the 10 steps ahead and on to the next thing. And if everyone's constantly playing catch up, then you're just focused on the client and solving interesting problems problems and we kind of create an engineering paradise in that same fashion of you know where else can you go to be able to just meet with clients and just believe that you can solve almost anything with technology as long as you've got the you know the right situations the right backing and the right clients who actually believe in the same kind of thing and spend way less time thinking about what our competitor is doing versus how we could be as special as possible to that client. So very aligned to the way you guys think about that too.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah. Yeah. And the pace at which you have to do the you know, execute on that next act. It's just, it's so fast. Yeah. If there's a, there's a lot of folks that, that want to execute on that next act and you have to be there. So it's, um, fun, fun thing to do. You don't get to hang your hat on anything anymore for too long. Somebody will take the hat off the hat rack.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, certainly. Hey, um, Evan, first of all, this has been awesome. Obviously, you've answered a bunch of questions that Tony and I had, and it's been a great conversation. But is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience that maybe we haven't had a chance to ask you?

Evan Macmillan:

Well, I mean, I'll tell you what's been on my mind recently. And I'm working on putting this into words, not just podcast chatter. But I'll tell you what's on my mind. And the big idea is that going into a world where we're going to see a lot more spikiness. And I think in a world of spikiness, a lot of the systems that we had in place to deal with questions related to your brokerage account or your doctor's appointment or, gosh, the, you know, the window siding you need for your house a lot of those systems are going to break and when those systems break a lot of folks are going to try to reach these businesses in the only way they know which is via voice they're going to say hey this really weird thing happened that i can't that I can't deal with through any of your other systems, please help me. And I think what you've seen in the last few months is this realization and at the highest level from our healthcare providers to the folks that run our banks, the folks that sell the window siding, that we need to really up our game when it comes to sort of understanding what people are experiencing requesting on these phone calls. And we need some ways to address these spikes in capacity. Because yeah, it was COVID this last year and still going on now, but it's not going to be the last COVID moment. It's not going to be the last time everybody calls their brokerage because game stock is going wild. We're going to need some new systems in place to deal with the fact that we're just moving into a weirder and weirder world. And not everything is going to be totally ready for self-service. So we're going to need a combination of technologies that can self-serve, like Grace, and we're going to need some technologies that can listen to what the hell people need help with because it's going to be a weirder, more complicated set of needs going forward. So we're really excited to be working on that problem with some of the largest healthcare companies in the world, some of the largest financial institutions in the world. And if you're interested in working on those problems with us, please come and join GridSpace. We'd love to have you.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, it's amazing. Thanks for that, Evan. And we see the same. Every day, I feel like we're running into situations where what you guys are working on is incredibly exciting. We think there's tremendous upside with where you're headed. And even where you guys are right now is pretty amazing. And really excited to see what the future holds for both of us working together. And thank you so much again for being on the show today.

Evan Macmillan:

Yeah, thank you guys. And have a great rest of your day. Thanks, Evan.

Outro:

Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast. Until

Intro:

next time.