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/entrepreneurial spirit: balancing creativity with compliance
49 Plays5 months ago
In this episode, we sit down with Rich Schramm, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of vizabli, to explore the essence of entrepreneurship. Rich dives into the complexities of working in highly-regulated industries like medical technology, highlighting how to balance creativity with compliance. Discover the drive it takes to embrace your inner entrepreneur!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
If you've ever seen the movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, where you know the Alec Baldwin character is like, ABC, always be closing, right? That was his mantra. My ABC is always be creating, right? Always be looking at the next thing, looking at the market, looking at emerging technologies especially, and seeing what you can create. Even if what you start creating doesn't really lead to anything, the knowledge that you gain from that is the foundation or the seed for your next great idea.
00:00:40
Speaker
Welcome to the Forward Slash, where we lean into the future of IT. I'm your host, Aaron Chesney, with my beautiful co-host, James Carmen. Today we're going to be talking about tech entrepreneurship in the healthcare care space.
00:00:53
Speaker
I'd like to welcome Rich Schramm, the founder of Fairwind Technologies. Rich has over 30 years of professional technology experience with a focus on internet based solution design and development. He's worked with web development architecture, emerging technologies, whole slew of things. He's had several CTO roles for various local businesses as well.
Rich Schramm's Background and Visibly Overview
00:01:18
Speaker
Currently, Rich is a tech entrepreneur and a co-founder of Visibly in Cincinnati. They have launched a new solution called Acute Care Engagement Solution, or ACES, which is working to put hospitality back into the hospital. Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show, Aaron. I'm excited to have a conversation with you.
00:01:43
Speaker
So, you know, Rich, i'm I'm glad you could join us today and that you're trying to help make the hospital environment better. I recently went to the doctor and I went in and I told him, doc, you got to help me.
00:01:54
Speaker
I'm a wigwam. I'm a teepee. I'm a wigwam. I'm teepeeing. I'm going to stop you right there. You're two tents. Nice. I'm just letting that joke kind of just wash over me, Aaron. I really wanted to enjoy it and just bask in that joke. Savor it. The two tents. That was a first-class dad joke, for sure. Yeah. That is right up there. I'm going to put that in my database.
00:02:20
Speaker
Well, why don't why don't we jump into it and talk about building solutions for healthcare
Challenges in Healthcare Technology
00:02:26
Speaker
industry? what What kind of special problems um you know do you see and how how is it different than say writing normal enterprise stuff?
00:02:36
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of um ah it's interesting. The technology landscape in healthcare care is very antiquated, ah surprisingly. And if you get into the um industry, you'll understand why. There's a lot of restriction and regulation. and so Once a product or a solution gets in place, it's it's very hard to to displace it ah because the amount of work that is involved in vetting and configuring and making sure that that solution um is is doing what it's supposed to do and not anything that it's not. You mean it's not like what I see on TV with all the
00:03:21
Speaker
the fancy gadgets and 3D printing organ parts and all that kind of stuff. ah Yeah, I have not in my experience ah seen that I've seen more, you know, people using 10 year old ah PCs and um Yeah, it's almost like ah the telegraph days and in a lot of places, especially when you get out into the the rural hospitals. um There's so much regulation that's involved in health care, not just the privacy, but um you know, with HIPAA and so forth, but you have to worry about FDA regulations and and high trust certifications and some of these other um things. And so it's ah it's it's a very different beast than an enterprise solution where, um you know, if if something goes wrong with an enterprise solution, you know, a business is down or may lose some money.
00:04:17
Speaker
if something goes wrong in a healthcare solution you know lives are at stake and so it becomes a a much more challenging and much more highly vetted type of environment now our solution visibly isn't actually a life safety system ah but we do integrate.
00:04:34
Speaker
with a lot of life safety systems. So we integrate with the health care system, the medical record system that they have there, so Epic or or whatnot. We integrate with the nurse call system, ah which is how you call a nurse into the room.
00:04:52
Speaker
um and ah a plethora of other systems. So food nutrition, real-time location, the what they call a PAC system, which brings up x-rays and so forth.
Visibly's Technological Integration
00:05:04
Speaker
ah We integrate with video conferencing and um a lot of ah technology like that, ah ah video um translation services. So aggregating all that together and presenting it is a is it essentially our our sweet spot. We pull all this data together in our platform, and then we present an experience in the patient room outside the patient ah door. So like in the hallway, ah we replace the door placards with ah basically touchscreen tablets that showing real-time data about the patient. um you know
00:05:46
Speaker
things like allergies and ah what the status of the room is, you know, is there a procedure and process, stuff like that. So it's all about taking real time data from all these systems and Essentially mashing it up and providing the right data to the right people at the right time um We've got boards in the nurse station and then in the patient room um we actually replace the television ah with a large 75 inch touchscreen tablet ah That's mounted to the wall. It looks like a television. It looks like a big television like a big screen, ah but it's actually a touchscreen tablet
00:06:27
Speaker
And then we bring IPTV onto that so the patient can watch television on it and on a big screen, just like they would the TV. Uh, but it allows a lot more interactivity and presentation of real time data. So you're getting like dual use out of it. Not only is it the TV for the patient, but it's also like a touch screen for the care providers that are coming in and out of the room.
00:06:52
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly correct. So right now in, in most hospitals, you get a health grade TV and the health grade TV is essentially connected to what they call a pillow speaker. It's like this big God awful remote on a big wire that's plugged into the wall and let you change the channel and go up and down and stuff like that. It's like a D pad, like a gaming controller almost.
00:07:17
Speaker
um And that plugs into the back of the TV. And a lot of times you know when you go into a hotel or a hospital, data some data is being presented on there as well as the picture. right So you get like, this is the people who are on your care team or you know her cover you know, this is when the gift shop is open, whatever the case is. And it's very static data, um and it doesn't really have a lot of, um I mean, it's it's useful, but it's not great. So we kind of inverted that. Instead of putting medical data onto a TV, we've put TV onto a medical data board.
00:07:57
Speaker
um So it becomes a a single solution on the wall that can be used for um the caregivers as well. So they can come in, they can badge into it with a badge, be able to unlock the board and bring up medical data. They can see x-rays, they can zoom in on those and talk to the patient and annotate on them and ah all that kind of thing. And then they can While they're talking to the patient, they can bring up a real time ah video translator um that comes in from an external service and they can use the camera and the device to see the patient and do things like sign language and or one of any like 250 languages. so in and you know So it's designed essentially for not just the patient, but there's there's really three segments that we serve, the patient,
00:08:52
Speaker
the patients, friends, and family. and the clinicians. And so that's why you'll hear, you if you're in the industry, you've heard the term patient engagement solution. This is why we call ours an acute care engagement solution, acute care being like a hospital. And so it's an overarching solution that includes patient engagement. So the patient can order their food, they can watch television, they can control the lights and the blinds and all of that through our solution.
00:09:23
Speaker
but then there's also components of it that are allowing ah clinicians to badge and get access to data that um is you know protected from other people, be able to interact with that, do rounds, save that data back to the medical record, all that kind of thing. And then at the nurse board,
00:09:47
Speaker
or a nurse station where the nurses are monitoring 30 patients on ah on
Patient and Family Engagement Tools
00:09:53
Speaker
a wing or a floor. We put that whole census board up there and we're showing you know real-time information about the room statuses and you know is patient to you know visitors welcome or not. And that's things the patient can control as well as you know where's the doctor, is the doctor in which room are they in. um like warnings and precautions all on like one large ah board. So ah it's really a very, very much a game changer in in the healthcare care industry because it really provides a great experience for um for everybody involved. But we're they also the only solution in the market that actually engages with friends and family as well. So we have like a mobile app that
00:10:43
Speaker
ah friends and family can download, they can you you the patient can invite people into what we call their circle of care. Those people get a notification to go download the app and set it up and they get a special code specifically for that patient. And then when things are happening in the hospital room for that patient, let's say people coming in and out of the room,
00:11:06
Speaker
um medications that have been prescribed, whatever, the patient can specifically say when they set up their circle of care, I want my aunt Betty to only just know when visiting hours are, but I want my spouse to be able to see everything about me ah and everything that's happening. And then, you know, um maybe the, somebody else only gets a subset of that. And then those people,
00:11:33
Speaker
while they're um at home or anywhere in the world, getting real-time notifications about events that are occurring in the hospital room. So it's like they're being kept in the loop. They're seeing what's happening. They can see the educational data that's been prescribed to that patient. They can get a notification that a nurse came in at 3 in the morning and and checked on it. Especially if you're a parent, you've got a kid in the hospital, it's critical to be able to keep those kind of ties up.
00:12:03
Speaker
And then when the doctor's in the room and he's wanting to have a conversation with the patient and that patient wants to bring in other family members um like they were in the room.
00:12:14
Speaker
They can just use the board and select all your circle members and say go. And it does a group video call out to the mobile app. So all these people everywhere in the world now brought back into the room in real time to be part of that solution. So yeah, we've we've really ah tried to um again, put the hospitality back into the hospital to to make this an experience. I mean, nobody wants to be in the hospital, right? It's it's horrible.
00:12:44
Speaker
ah experience for most people, but if we can at least make it better ah for people and we can make it better, not just for the patient, but their family members and their friends and and the clinicians, we can help save them work, then it's a win for everybody.
00:13:02
Speaker
So lots of questions. How was the HIPAA like getting through, because I can imagine like, Oh, I'm giving access to my, you know, my care information to different people through a system. How reluctant are the hospitals? Like, how did you get through the, like, this is, this complies with all the HIPAA regulations and all of that fun stuff. How how was that experience for you? Oh, and before you jump into that, I just want to clarify that HIPAA is like all the, the personal protection, um,
00:13:29
Speaker
information act stuff for your your health records and stuff, if you're not familiar with the term HIPAA. I know we we use it a lot in technology to for protected data and it's really important to us. um But if you haven't heard that term before, that's what we're talking about.
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of acronyms in not only technology, but healthcare care technology. So um we all also hear PHI for personal health information and PII for um ah personal other information. So there's there's a lot of that. and um The HIPAA is is actually an interesting creature because there is no certification for HIPAA. And this is one of the things that I found very interesting when I got into the industry. um And I think it's it's pretty smart the way that the government, if you can believe the government, did something smart.
00:14:25
Speaker
um the way that they structured this, because in the past, you would put in regulations, and by the time those regulations were actually enacted, the technology had already ah moved on. And so what they have done with the Health Insurance Privacy and Portability Act, I think that's what it stands for. Something like that, Portability and Portability Act.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yeah, the um what what it is ah done is they've put in basically guidelines that have said there you have to meet commercially reasonable um standards of protecting this patient health information. um And you have to do certain things like end to end encryption. You have to have um audit trails. So anytime that the data is updated or released or displayed anywhere and so on and so forth, um that it it needs to be audited. And there's some other ah set of guidelines, but there's no actual certification process. There's no body that comes in and says, this is HIPAA compliant or this isn't. As long as you meet um these
00:15:39
Speaker
kind of general requirements. You are essentially um HIPAA compliant. So there is no HIPAA certification. A lot of the privacy things come from the hospital itself. And so, um you know, there's there are some hospitals that are very much about like um like outside the patient room door.
00:16:03
Speaker
um we display the patient name. And our system is designed very, very flexibly so that the hospitals can decide how they want to display that name. Do they want to put the first letter in the last three of the last name? Do they want to reverse that? Do they want to put the whole first name and no last name? So all these different ways that hospitals want to do it, do they want to have no ah name at all on the board? And sometimes the medical record will say if this person is ah a VIP or maybe a victim of domestic violence, they don't want to have the names displayed at all outside the door. And so the system has to account for all of these these different scenarios. ah Some hospitals are OK having like a list of allergies outside the door or a list of um upcoming medications displayed inside the room. Some of them only want to say when the next medication is coming and not what those medications are.
00:17:02
Speaker
ah Some people want to have ah the real-time vitals. That's what's called telemetry. And so we integrate with telemetry systems. And so we can put right there on the board in the patient room all the hemodynamic data about you know your blood pressure and pulse and temperature and respirations and all that.
00:17:22
Speaker
Some hospitals want to display that, some don't. Some want to have that on the board, but only behind a protected page. So um each hospital has its own very distinct a set of um rules regarding um data that they want to keep private
Privacy and Compliance in Healthcare
00:17:40
Speaker
and not. And so um our way of being able to deal with that, obviously, we do all the end-to-end encryption. we basically do all of the audit trails. We're behind the firewall. So we we actually run in-house in most cases um and not up in the cloud, except for the video conferencing aspect, which is ah ah necessary in some cases to be up in the cloud, but just that piece of it. But overall, the solution that has to be adaptable um
00:18:16
Speaker
and But at the same point in time, it can't be a custom built for every hospital or we'd go ah we'd never be able to get anything done. So we've had to take a very dynamic um approach of giving everybody the ultimate flexibility.
00:18:32
Speaker
how you want to lay out your screens, what they look like, um all of that stuff, what data you want to be able to display, how you want to be able to display it, when it should be displayed. ah it's ah It's a very, very significant admin component that's part of that that allows for all that. And that's essentially how we have ah been able to satisfy the HIPAA requirements for ah privacy and and also the hospital's handling of PHI and stuff like that. So, one thing that, you know, we we know each other a long time, Rich, so we worked together back in the day a long time ago, a few years ago. Forever ago, yeah. Forever ago. what How did you get into this world and how did this become your, an area of interest for you, to my knowledge,
00:19:24
Speaker
Like i don't I don't remember you being from the medical industry or maybe you weren't somewhere doctors or anything. How did this come to be? Yeah, it's kind of ah an interesting um story. So I actually started, um i I left industry to become an entrepreneur um back in the mid teens. um And I ah developed a solution um that was near and dear to my heart ah because I have kids that are neurodiverse, both autism and and ADHD.
00:20:00
Speaker
And whole the whole section of my family is is like that and probably I i know I was the never been diagnosed But I was probably the poster child for ADHD when I was in school. I certainly put the H in ADHD when I was a kid um but the um ah So I designed a solution for families that wanted to be um ah More ah had more, needed more help in managing ah their family and their children and making sure their children were getting stuff done. Because we had the same problem. Our our kids were, you know, they really wanted to do well. um They just, you know, struggled with um ah getting things done, getting it done on time, remembering to do things. And so I created a ah solution
00:20:55
Speaker
of that um was designed and to help in that. and brought it to market. And it has not yet been successful. So um I ah ah kind of, once we launched it, we um put it on the back burner. I realized I wasn't going to be able to, um at that point, ah sustain my ah my family um with the revenue from that. And I learned a lot from that experience and in different ah ways. I may have been a little ah
00:21:30
Speaker
um too interested in not showing ads to people um you know because people that were using it were ADHD. I didn't want to make anything more distracting. But people also really want everything for free when it comes to the B2C and the ah app space. So ah that was kind of a ah opposing needs.
00:21:55
Speaker
But regardless, um so I got into the space that way, and I learned a lot in dealing with um the data and that type of thing. And then I went back into industry um and became a CTO at a a company that made health care grade televisions. And ah they were dabbling in the um ah Interactive whiteboard space they were looking to take these android tvs that were um that they had ah and build a new device ah that was essentially like.
00:22:37
Speaker
You know, these were health grade TVs where it had the same, you know, with the operating system where you could drive the menuing and stuff like that and do some very rudimentary things of what we're doing. And so they had this idea about bringing the solution to to market ah that would be interactive whiteboards and um and
Inspiration and Founding of Visibly
00:22:58
Speaker
things like that. And so um I came on board as the CTO of that company. And I did that ah for a couple of years and learned a ton about the industry. So we I created their solution um in that space.
00:23:15
Speaker
And I realized that there was a lot, lot more that could be done ah in that area and not just in the hospital area, but in other adjacent um verticals that were related to health care. And ah the owners of that company, it was a very small company, weren't really ah in enter into doing any of that. um And so um I eventually left ah to start a um company that um taking what I learned in that company and in previously and ah building a solution that would serve not just um the clinicians but also the patients and also the friends and family all in one overarching solution. and so
00:24:05
Speaker
um I left and started with a blank sheet of paper um and um went through a process and I actually brought in the team that had helped me develop my original app solution.
00:24:21
Speaker
um Way back prior to me joining that other company ah and um went to work and designed out a solution that I knew was was badly needed and.
00:24:39
Speaker
um We were able to bring it to market. I got our first client and ah that went really well and it's just kind of gone ah from there. So we're in installed in hospitals all around the country and we're actually ah in the process of installing um the largest one of the largest hospital networks in the country right now. i can't say the name specifically because the project is is in progress, but many, many thousands of hospital rooms throughout the system. Wow. That's awesome. it's been a yeah That solution, they they kind of ah pushed us even farther because they we were actually brought in by a health care innovation consulting company that that hospital system had hired.
00:25:32
Speaker
to find the best solution in the market for what they were trying to do because they wanted to build the hospital room of the future. And so this company interviewed us and seven other people, including major, major household name vendors. And ah we won the deal because our solution was so much more ah flexible than anybody else's.
00:25:58
Speaker
When I designed it, I built it as a platform upon which you could create solutions. And that platform allowed us to be able to very quickly integrate with other technologies um and add new features. And so they were like, we need you to make it so that the patient can just speak to the device. you know ah Set my visitor status to no visitors and have the system do that, um which is you know basically building our own uh, you know, smartest home assistant, but for the hospital and keep it all locally because nothing can go up to the cloud, right? For security things. So what's the, what's the cool name you give it? Like if you're laying in my hospital bed and I say, do I say, Hey, visibly, or what do I say? Like, is there actually the nick name? You say, Hey, Vizzy, V I Z Z Y. I knew it was a half joking question, but I knew there had to be something cool there.
00:26:54
Speaker
Well, that's, that's what's called a wake word. And it's, uh, it has to be very, uh, very unique and specific because the system is always listening for that wake word and then replies back. And there's no AI behind it. I mean, it's just natural language processing in them, but, um, you know, that type of thing is certainly on the horizon. So as, as being an entrepreneur in, in You know, obviously you're in your mind, you're always an entrepreneur, right? It's kind of one of those things you you can't turn off. And because I get that too. I've always said, I just need my million dollar idea so I can break out and and and make it work. It's never a good time, just like having kids. There's never a right time for doing it. So in what's, I imagine it's kind of like cutting core. That scariest moment is when you say, okay, I'm setting off.
00:27:50
Speaker
now in that, in that, that first day is probably the hardest one. Yeah. But you know, how do you, how do you prepare for that? And how do you know, like, or is it just like jumping on everything? You just got to go into it. It's I would say it's a little bit of both, to be honest with you. Um, like you said, if if if you're an entrepreneur,
00:28:16
Speaker
You're an entrepreneur. and um Over the years, you know I spent a lot of time in consulting, um running business practices. like i i used to When James and I were at a previous consulting company, I was managing their web development and emerging technologies practice.
00:28:37
Speaker
and So, I gained a lot of ah business knowledge by being an entrepreneur, if you will, um running a lot of um business units within these organizations. I ran a R and&D lab for another company. that was from a serial entrepreneur, ah launched products under that R and&D lab. So I got some experience doing that. But in all the time that I was ah doing those things, even from my earliest career, when I
00:29:10
Speaker
I left the military. um i So i I don't have a college degree. I'm a college dropout. right So I i ah dropped out after my freshman year because I was majoring in in beer and and and parties um and decided I needed to really kind of get myself focused. And so um I joined the Coast Guard full time. And ah during that like time, I got married.
00:29:40
Speaker
and um ah I decided that I would go and get some real world experience and then go back to college on the GI Bill. And so ah when I left ah the military, um my wife was in college at the time. And so we um you know I went and joined NASDAQ and in Washington DC and started off in like their you know IT Microsystem Support Department.
00:30:11
Speaker
And eventually, I kind of moved up the chain there to the point where I um was working in a group where we did all kinds of ah basically setting corporate standards for technology, which was kind of the geek's dream job. right You got to just go out and find new toys and play with them and see if this was the ah something that would be useful to the to the enterprise.
00:30:35
Speaker
And I somehow got involved in um this emerging technology called the World Wide Web and how that could potentially be used and um in NASDAQ and and the para company NASD.
00:30:50
Speaker
I think I've heard of that the World Wide Web thing before. and Yeah, you know, it's about it's catching on. Yeah.
Rich's Early Career and Innovation Lessons
00:30:59
Speaker
I think it'll be big someday. um But maybe. ah yeah ah So essentially, I built one of the first corporate intranets using this technology. And then I became the webmaster for NASDAQ and help I was the lead UI developer for the NASDAQ.com 1.0. And I saw a TV ad ah that actually showed my work on TV, right? So it was NASDAQ's TV ad and it showed the homepage and it says NASDAQ has a new home
00:31:37
Speaker
page and you know this was like mid early 90s and I got such a thrill out of that and I was like I just I love creating products um I really want to do that and I love the internet I love the technology I was actually doing internet work in the Coast Guard way back in the day connecting um various Coast Guard sites along the yeah and network. So i had I had learned technology. I guess that's an important thing to understand. While I was in the Coast Guard, I became, ah after I was doing, I was down in Florida doing search and rescue and law enforcement, which was a whole different experience. And then I went to school to become a marine science technician in the hope to become a weather forecaster, which is one of the subspecialties of that job. And
00:32:27
Speaker
um When I graduated from the school, they didn't have any weather jobs available, and they were like, well, you can go to Puget Sound and wipe oil off of rocks, or you can go to Coast Guard headquarters and do computers. And I was like, well, it's a pretty easy choice. so Good choice. You could have ended up in a Dawn commercial, though. I could have. That's true. here there' though Those are my hands.
00:32:51
Speaker
so but but even yeah But even from those that those early experiences, when I started um at NASDAQ and I was working on um doing this web stuff, I had this idea of, man, I could really create like a website that would let people find apartments.
00:33:09
Speaker
And I talked to my boss at the time. I'm like, what do you think about an idea like that? And he's like, nobody is that ah lives in an apartment can afford a computer. So nobody is going to want to anything like that. And I was like, yeah and I really respect the guy. and yeah He was he was right. But I just had this vision of all these things that could be done. And I, you know, I i sometimes wish that I could go back and and punch myself in the head. and Yeah, it's it's amazing how
00:33:39
Speaker
Like certain people, they don't they don't think outside the box when it comes to using technology. and yeah ah you And I know James and I have run into this at places we've been at as well, where the you make a suggestion that I can see this going this direction. and People are like, oh no, that'll never happen. And then two or three years later, it's like, oh, look what everybody's asking for.
00:34:06
Speaker
You know the type of thing and like the apartment finders like I've used an apartment finder before and I'm like, yeah, and it's like, oh, this is awesome. Um, but I could have built that in 1993. Right. But I, I, I didn't feel like I knew enough about, you know, and I, I had a ton of respect for my, my boss and and I still do. He's a great guy, but.
00:34:30
Speaker
I probably should have listened to my instinct and not um other people, but I didn't know enough at the time to realize that the that thinking out of the box about the technology is is kind of a rare ah thing. um And um it's ah you know not for what it's worth, it's it's something that I really love. i i'm I've always been like I ran the emerging technologies practice. And so I i always have these cockamamie ideas about how new things could be done or other things could be done better.
00:35:08
Speaker
and But at the time I just, you know, I was like, yeah, you're right. It's probably a dumb idea and shelved it and went on to do other stuff. And but I've always had that entrepreneur. I know this is a very circuitous route back to your question.
00:35:24
Speaker
But I've always had that kind of entrepreneurial desire to build things, build new products. But I also never really had the guts to just you know not ah to leave industry and start building stuff. I mean, who am I? right i don't I don't know ah anything about ah running a business or or whatever. And that's that was always the mindset.
00:35:49
Speaker
The older I got, the more I realized that the vast majority of business people, um even the ones with like MBAs and whatever. They're just kind of following a prescribed script of things that they've learned. They're they're they're building on a lot of times um what's already been built upon before without questioning, um you know, is there a better way of doing this? it's It's not so much about creating new things. It's about making things more efficient or making things more profitable. ah and and And that kind of thinking really just
00:36:27
Speaker
It it ate at me it drove me it drove me crazy cuz i saw so many potential ways to to make the world a better place um you know and and be able to make money doing it um and it's just not a mindset that you find in the in the business world.
00:36:46
Speaker
um And a lot of times what you'll find is is just the opposite when people get. Some modicum of success then they stop trying to create anything new and rest on those laurels and you know blackberry right everybody had a blackberry at the time right and they were super successful the cash cow as they call it right the right no cash go.
00:37:08
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. and And they stopped spending money on innovation and and pushing the product forward because, hey, they're the only game in town, right? um And all of a sudden, here's Apple and and a little bit later, Google, and ate their lunch for them. And by the time they realized what was happening, they were too late.
00:37:28
Speaker
Now Blackberry's just a jam again. Exactly. It's not my jam though. um Sorry, I had to, had to do the dad joke there myself. yeah Jump on in, the water's fine. that Yeah. And I think, I think, um, I've actually used in a talk before, um, you know, where I was talking to a bunch of young developers, I said, you know, you got to think of yourselves as being.
00:37:55
Speaker
paid inventors, right? You've got to be thinking about the next solution and beyond what the ask is so that we can keep moving because in there's that that that trend out there of
00:38:24
Speaker
type yeah like absolutely and anything that you can create when you become the market leader um Everybody else looks at it and goes, oh, that's a good idea and they've been successful. So let's do that too. And then pretty soon you're you're in the you're just one of the to of a number of solutions, right?
00:38:46
Speaker
so if you look at like ah If you've ever seen the movie, Glengarry Glen garry glenn Ross, where you know the Alec Baldwin character is like, ABC, always be closing. right That was his mantra. um my My ABC is always be creating. right and Always be looking at the next thing, looking at the market, um looking at emerging technologies especially, and seeing what um what you can create.
00:39:14
Speaker
ah Even if what you start creating doesn't really lead to anything, the knowledge that you gain from that is the foundation or the seed for your next great idea. um And if you are pigeonholed and you're just you know in ah in a cube, but um doing the same you know AS-400 programming over and over again. Eventually, that's all you'll ever be able to to do. and so Essentially, I just got you know my my entrepreneurial itch and my desire to create new, great things.
00:39:52
Speaker
and get paid myself for it as opposed to doing it for customers, um overrode my intrinsic fear of failure. And I just decided, you know what, it's it's time to make it happen. And ah off I went, and and then I didn't.
00:40:11
Speaker
make it happen um is as well as I would like. So it's like, OK, well, ah now what? Well, back to the industry, try to keep this alive and ah you know get a steady paycheck and ah come up with my next thing. And yeah that's essentially ah where it is. The second time around, it was a lot less scary because I already knew a lot of the what, uh, what to look for and learned how to, uh, made a lot of mistakes that I learned from. So it made, it made it a little bit less scary to, to do it the, uh, second and third and fourth time. So, um, so let's say I wanted to, yeah I have this idea. Okay. Um, in, we'll, we'll call it some type of device or, or software concept idea, like what
00:41:08
Speaker
kinds of advice would you give to somebody that says you know I want to build this and I want to market this I want to make this my company you know what you know what advice could you give somebody that that that has that I would advise first don't start with a what start with a why what is it that you're trying to do right the device or the software idea that you have ah this idea for What is it trying to solve? um What is it trying to improve? Why do you care about it? You need to have a why to get people on board. A what is is good, but you know if
00:41:52
Speaker
If you've ever heard Simon Sinek's, people by don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. I think that's a very, very true statement. If you want to get ah help from people, if you want to get um friends and family to to help fund your idea. If you want to get angel investors, if you want to get other businesses, find customers, you need to have a solid why. um Why this is essential, what the problem is and why you're the right person to fix that problem and what how it's going to make the world a better pace place. you got to You have to have the passion for
00:42:39
Speaker
what you're trying to solve, then you look at, okay, not just the initial idea I had of this gadget doing this thing, but what other things can I do to to answer my why?
00:42:57
Speaker
um and And that way, you're not trying to create a solution that's looking for a problem. um You're actually creating a solution to something that you know is there, but you're not pigeonholing you know tunnel vision yourself into saying, I'm all about creating this um this mobile app that does this. Now it's like, I know this mobile app is going to fix this why, but I also, oh wait, I could also create a ah wearable that could do that. And I could also create a ah web app that could do that. And I could create some other thing that, you know, and and your ideas will start to expand because you're not focused on the what.
00:43:44
Speaker
you're focused on the why you're focused on solving that problem. um And so that mindset always will help you tremendously in having a broader um ah focus ah um And you have to stay focused, right? Just because you come up with all these ideas doesn't mean you have to you know dabble in 30 things. You find the one thing that's going to create the most impact. It's going to help the most. And you focus there, but you design with the idea of how it's going to expand and what things you're going to be able to do.
00:44:20
Speaker
And so in that type of space, you can get people excited, right? You can get potential employees excited. You can get potential partners and customers excited. um You can get yourself excited because you know entrepreneurship is not easy. And there are days when um you know I wake up and I'm like, why am I putting myself through this? you know It's ah you know blah, blah, blah. and um you know You need to have ah that passion about what you're trying to create or solve to be able to get through those those tough times. Yeah. in um ah On that um that point about having the why,
00:45:06
Speaker
even go beyond just like one Y, we used to try and do a five Ys model, like, you know, like drill down with additional Ys. So, you know, it's like, why would somebody want this? Well, because of this. Well, why do they need to do that? Well, because of this. And then it's like, well, why don't they just do this? And it's like, oh, because this would be, you know, and if you can get to five levels of Y, then you probably have something pretty solid on your hands.
00:45:35
Speaker
that is a need that requires a solution. Yeah, and and that's a really great way of vetting your initial why. um i think the When I talk about a why, I think it's more of a, um you know, it's it's your mission, right? And that's the, um you know, every mission, you have to validate whether or not it's, you're completely insane and you need to step away from it. um And that's when you get into those whys, like, well, why would somebody want to do this? Why would they pay us to do this? Why wouldn't they go with something else? Why hasn't anybody else done this?
00:46:16
Speaker
And you'll find a lot of people, um you know, there and and a lot of people that are that love you and want to help you and protect you will be anti-innovative, right? They'll be like, why would you want to put your family at risk? If this was a good idea, why hasn't anybody else done it? if for this If everybody else is doing it, why do you think you can do it better?
00:46:41
Speaker
yeah Why do you want to start this at your age? yeah Exactly. ah there's I mean, I can give you a hundred reasons why any thing won't work without even knowing what what the problem is, right? If it was a good idea, somebody else would have already done it. It's going to be it's going to be too expensive. It's too risky. And and the people say that.
00:47:05
Speaker
because they don't, you know, it new new things scare people. um And especially in hospital technology, oh my God, ah dealing with the culture of no in a healthcare setting is, um it's astounding that they are even using computers in the hospital just because of how ah ah cautious and and risk averse people are.
00:47:32
Speaker
I imagine you would run into the tradition problem as well a lot there too. Like we've always done it this way. Why would we? Oh, absolutely. Sure. Uh, you know, and you know, if that was the case, then leeches still be used for, uh, uh, trying to solve problems. Uh, and, and some of it's also ego driven, right? And especially in, in the healthcare, uh, industries, if you know anything about, um, the, uh, hand washing, um,
00:48:03
Speaker
Doctors were just very set against having to wash their hands um throughout history. It was, it was insulting to say that they were dirty. ah And, um, you know, it wasn't until the like mid, uh, 1870s hospital in Vienna, uh, noticed that doctors who were working on cadavers and then went to deliver babies,
00:48:32
Speaker
you know, the mothers and the babies would die um a lot more frequently. And so the a person there at that hospital finally put an edict down saying, you must wash your hands ah before you deliver babies. And guess what?
00:48:48
Speaker
the mortality rate for babies and and mothers went way down. But you have to provide that ah that kind of information to people. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that nowadays, even with like AI. Recent studies just in the last few days came out from Stanford, where um chat GPT was actually able to better diagnose um something um from a medical record than doctors were, right? ChatGPT got it 90% of the time and doctors got it 76% of the time, something like that, the mid 70s. So it's interesting you you bring up AI um because that was actually kind of where I was looking to go next was especially with like the entrepreneurship and the biggest thing being AI that we've heard about is kind of
00:49:40
Speaker
you know i've I've seen it equated to the beginning of the internet is this this AI trend. Talk to us a little bit about like using AI as a tool versus as a product feature. like you know how How could we differentiate and use it in the different spaces? Do you think in in this medical field,
00:50:06
Speaker
um I think in the medical field, um the ah It's going to be a challenge for any number of reasons. um There's a ton of you know risk averseness, obviously, like I've said, in in that whole industry. um And that risk is not only about data protection. It's also about um you know misdiagnosis and um you know basically having making mistakes in the in the health environment. And um and I think there's some some job protection issues as well. So I think of all the places that um ah AI is going to struggle for adoption the most, it's it's going to be in in the health care space.
AI in Healthcare: Potential and Applications
00:50:59
Speaker
And I think that's um and probably in the state that AI is in right now, that's probably a good thing.
00:51:07
Speaker
i think ah it can be used as a tool um I think it can be used as a as an assistant ah in health care for doing things like um you know aggregating data and and looking at patterns and and finding trends and that kind of thing. ah But I wouldn't put any yeah any faith in um it it's doing much more than that. i mean Diagnosing a a thing, I think that's a tool that a doctor should be able to say, look at my case file and give me a diagnosis. But nothing you know you can't just take that and say, okay, prescribe this medication because chat GPT told me that. right You have to have some ah um experience level, right? The human level experience. So I think using in in in a AI in the medical industry, I think is going to be for a long time um in the area of of being, one, ah doing natural natural language processing, NLP. So nurses um can chart into the ah ah into the microphone in the room, you know like
00:52:25
Speaker
We are talking about the patient right now has the ability to speak to the, you know, hey, Vizzy, turn on the lights or lower the shades or, you know, set my visitor status to no visitors, right? And these are not life safety ah type things. If you chart wrong, um that, you know, it miss misenter data into the chart and somebody uses that data to change of medication, something like that. I mean, that's a life safety issue, right? So I think the it's going to be in drips and drabs, and it's going to take a huge ton of vetting. So it's going to be more providing um a ah doing the scut work um that nurses don't want to do. They'd rather not type
00:53:14
Speaker
right um They'd rather just speak while they're actually doing the round have that data go into the medical record but they have to have that validated by somebody so you're gonna see ai doing things like that and then being validated by a human being before it gets ah put up into ah the system. So similar to what we're seeing in other professions too, like you've got, uh, like plugins to your ID that are helping you code in and do those things, but it's, it's kind of a, yeah, go ahead in and give me what your thoughts are and then I'm going to make it actually work.
00:53:48
Speaker
Right. I'm going to make my own decision, but I want your feedback on it. Right. um And yeah, I mean that I use and like every other developer I'm imagining I use AI as a tool to do a lot of You know, documenting my endpoints and um maybe I'll highlight a ah block of code and say, you know, analyze this and see if this can be done more efficiently or um you know whatever the case is. But the ah you still at the end, you're responsible ah for.
00:54:22
Speaker
um that ah thing. And so you know I would never ask chat GPT to um you know fly my airplane or um make medical diagnosis without a human being also being there to be able to step in and and ah do that. And and and you know it's it's really, really good at doing things that would require you know analyzing a large amount of data. right So you can look at a patient's medical history um that a human doctor just doesn't have the time or whatever to do, but you look at a 20-year history
00:55:01
Speaker
the ah chat GPT can go through that in a couple of seconds and say, well, based on over the last 20 years, all these admissions have this one thing in common. Maybe we should be looking at that. um And then, you know, surfacing that to the doctor. Oh, you know I've been thinking it's this and it's actually lupus or or whatever, but I never um you know saw all of that ah together. So I think um you know that's that's the place where it's going to be used the most as as an assistant, but it's going to be a long time before you have automated robot doctors that are intelligent coming in and ah diagnosing and prescribing for you.
00:55:42
Speaker
So another, another profession that we've claimed is not going to be replaced by AI. So that's, that's a good thing. Um, cause you know, that was the big thing when we heard AI was going, it's like, Oh, it's going to replace all the developers. No, it's not. So now we know from previous episodes that lawyers aren't going to be replaced by AI either. And now doctors, but I'll tell you what, if AI can speed them up, so I don't have to wait six months to get a physical, ah that would be, that would be fantastic.
00:56:10
Speaker
or Or go through a year of try this, try this, try this. Oh, that's the worst. And then have to wait three months between visits? Yeah. Yeah. if If I could just get it so when I showed up to my appointment, I didn't have to wait for two hours in the waiting room. That would be certainly a huge step forward.
00:56:30
Speaker
And truthfully, that that's the kind of thing that AI can help with, right? um Doing the logistics of of doing that. Hospitals are really bad about um trying to you know clear beds. um that They have a patient needing to be discharged. Well, they've got to go through 30 different things to get a discharge, right? The doctor has to come in and talk with them. They have to have a social worker maybe come in, and you know do you install the rails at your house? you have to wait for these people to get this back into these papers. So being able to use AI to optimize that process and turn beds over more quickly, it's going to help the ah hospital. But again, it's not a ah life safety thing. I don't want, I think most people would say at this point, the technology is just nowhere near mature enough to rely on it from a life safety perspective.
00:57:24
Speaker
I wouldn't want it, I wouldn't want to make a medical decision for me, I know that much. Yeah, exactly. I think where generative AI is, is and as you said, Rich, is is being able to look at information and maybe,
00:57:37
Speaker
Because of the way it's it's built based on you know vectors and similarity, it can it can find connections between things that our human brains might not be able to as quickly as easily. I use it for like, I'm thinking through this situation. Here are the options I'm considering. Is there another thing I should be considering? And it's very good at that sort of thing. So maybe from a medical standpoint, I can think of like, ah you know, Dr. House sitting there is whiteboard, right? He's got his three doctors there. You could ask chat GPT, what are some of the possibilities? But you still want to do the actual test, right? Oh, go do a lumbar puncture. Go do a blood test. Go bla blah, blah, blah. And by the way, Dr. House would say it's never a lupus. So you can just. Right. It's never lupus. so It's never lupus. Didn't he hide like his drugs in the book about lupus or something like that? and there's I don't know. Something like that. Yeah. This is Vicodin.
00:58:27
Speaker
Well, and I think another place that that AI can be used in this industry is in in research. right I mean, there's already it's using it to do you know folding proteins in unique ways to create drugs and stuff. But what my hope is, and again, getting back to my whole background with neurodivergency, I would love to... I feel very strongly that ADHD is part of the autism spectrum, right? um I've got a child with autism. I've got three children with ADHD. i And I see a lot of overlap in that. And it's not right now. And that's fine. It doesn't really need to be. But I feel like from an epigenetics standpoint,
00:59:14
Speaker
There's there's genetic propensity towards certain things and then those genes express themselves based on environmental things right. and i I feel i'm hopeful i' and and you know i may be wrong in this but i'm hopeful that by feeding a huge corpus of data into.
00:59:35
Speaker
um an an AI thing about people with a specific diagnosis of ADHD or autism. ah and And as much data as you can about those individuals that it can find a pattern of, oh, well, gee, everybody that you know whose mom drank Diet Pepsi and ate Snickers bars during the pregnancy ended up with you know whatever the case is. um and dumb Mars and and Pepsi don't come after me. I'm just using that as an example. But you know the net of it is there's um you know my my mom had ALS.
01:00:15
Speaker
and a horrible disease and would love to find a cure for that. But I think there's an epigenetic ah predisposition for that as well, because her best friend, who was also a nurse with her at the same hospital and went to the same nursing school, she just got diagnosed with ALS as well. And the chances of that is astronomical. So I'm looking at it and thinking, what is it About you know and they're like best friends so they also would they have a co-owned a lake house and all this stuff so they were around a lot of the same environments both in nursing school and in the hospital and out at this um you know this lake and they spend so much time together and for the two of those things which is a very very rare disease as it is for the two of them to end up with that.
01:01:09
Speaker
There's got to be a correlation, right? But it's so much data. There's so vast amounts of data to try to find that. that it's just I just don't think it's humanly possible. So I'm hopeful in the future, AI will be able to process that all that data and be able to look at it and say, aha.
01:01:26
Speaker
you know this and this together, here's this correlation. And guess what? It's not vaccines um that cause autism. It's it's it's other things. But um having um a ah computer that actually has real um unbiased um Ability to to look at correlations and and come up with potential causation to me that's that's what the most exciting thing i think i can play in health care.
01:01:59
Speaker
Computationally, we're absolutely there. It would be a matter of just gathering the data, the exact data point from two different people throughout their history of their life and all that kind of stuff. I think that's going to be our big problem, is coding these people into a big vector. We did hundreds of billions of data points on these vectors for the large language models.
01:02:21
Speaker
So computationally, absolutely. We're there if you can get the information. But yeah, so it's just that's the I think that's going to be the key is figuring out how do we vectorize everyone? We can do this. This is embed embed them. Yeah, and and vectorization is.
01:02:38
Speaker
Vectorization is a great ah great application of AI. i mean i'm using that you know you We're talking about how could this be used as a feature. um and um you know I'm developing some solutions right now, um a recommendation engine um that is based on a ah pretty sizable a sample of data.
01:02:59
Speaker
And um using AI um you know through the API to vectorize that data and put it back into a vector store and then use that for retrieval augmented generation um in my ah thing. So when i'm when the the consumer is um of of this chatbot is asking for um a recommendation on something,
01:03:28
Speaker
It can look first at at the at the tool, the the rag, and look for products ah there and retrieve that data. And then it can use the internet as a tool, you know like chat GPT has the internet API. And it can actually control your computer now, which is kind of crazy. but um It but it has a ah tool to go out and and research on the Internet and it has its own built-in training and so being able to use AI to pull all of that data together and then ah clean Clean that up and filter it and summarize it and and bring you know ah pull back
01:04:08
Speaker
um you know Average things out and say, well, if you like this, then you'll probably like this. um the um that's That's a great use of AI, and that's that's one of the areas that I'm ah focused on right now for a particular startup venture that I'm working on.
01:04:29
Speaker
And then also um being able to use AI to create agents to go out and continuously ah keep my my data up to date and re-vectorize data and stuff like that is super important because that's a ton of um ah kind of scut work that you know I would have to pay a person ah to to do that I can pay AI to do instead. so Uh, this has been a really good, uh, this has been a really good conversation and I've enjoyed talking with you. Uh, we need to move on to our next segment, ship it or skip it. Ship over, skip, ship over, skip everybody. We got to tell them to ship over, skip. So the way ship or skip it works is, uh, we're going to throw out a topic and you either say ship it as in.
01:05:27
Speaker
yes, keep this, I like this idea, or I like this technology, or skip it, as in, no, we we don't need to be doing that kind of stuff, or it's not ready, um you know, maybe in limited applications. So with our first one, James, you want to give us our first ship or skip it topic?
Startup Strategies and Challenges
01:05:47
Speaker
Yeah, I was trying to come up with stuff related to specifically around the startup culture and startup, you know, the that world for you, since that's a big part of your world.
01:05:55
Speaker
um It's not like skimping on quote code quality for to for getting your MVP out to market. what What do you think about that concept? Ship it. um I would say that technical debt is ah something that a lot of startups contend with. But if you want to um cut corners on the back end,
01:06:23
Speaker
ah to be able to get a product out to market quickly and get validation of you know product market fit and things like that. um You could spend a lot of time ah creating super ah perfect code and then have it ah just not be ah well accepted in the marketplace so get it out there, ah get it tested. you know If you look at Eric Rice's, the lean startup, it's very much that model of ah iterate often and see what what works and then go back and and ah um fix up the stuff that does but don't spend too much time working on something that just may not have the legs in the first place.
01:07:05
Speaker
i'm i'm goingnna be a little bit towards the other side, I'm going to say skip it um to a certain extent. um I agree with the don't gold plate it, but also don't create broken windows because that that first version, if it does have legs, it needs to go, then you've already got something that you have to go back and fix. So you're already incurring maintenance costs at the very beginning.
01:07:32
Speaker
So I'm, I'm more on the skip inside, but don't go crazy with trying to make it perfect on the first go around. And I would say the V viable, right? The minimum viable product. That's the question, right? I mean, you don't want to skip or ship, uh, things that you know are broken, but, uh, it's only enough to get the, make it viable, not, not perfect. I think is more of my, uh, my mentality.
01:07:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think I'm um ship it with you know a caveat. Obviously, like if there's if if it's security, you're putting people's information at risk or something like that, I would ah probably would shy away from that. I want to make sure. But yeah, you you absolutely can ship to to production with... with debt involved and you want to get to you you want get that feedback loop going right when get something in front of your customers and learn more about you know is your product really helping people is it changing their lives and i am with you like us developers we we tend to want things to be perfect and and perfect often becomes the the enemy of good right.
01:08:35
Speaker
and and we we we want, oh I'll just get it to 99.5% code coverage or whatever. you know and we no no Just get it out there in front of the customer. We can we can clean stuff up there. Honestly, a lot of these these solutions end up having to be rewritten for scale anyway when we get into B-round funding and whatnot. so yeah I'm with you on that. I'd say ship it. Our next one is building a hustle culture for your startup.
01:09:03
Speaker
Well, again, I think we're into definitions of what a hustle culture is. um i you you I would say skip it. um I'm more of a ah passion culture, right? I want people to hustle because they're passionate about um what they're building, not because they're afraid of losing their job or their equity.
01:09:26
Speaker
um so um When I think of hustle culture, I think of you know you've got to work 80 hour weeks and um so on and so forth. um That becomes a ah given if you're if you have a good enough why. And people are bought into ah the mission. they They want to put the effort into it. So if the if it's about um you know everybody has to work for peanuts in 80 hour weeks,
01:09:56
Speaker
ah If they're not bought in, I say skip it. I'm with you on... Skip it. I agree with you on the why you absolutely want people bought in on on your your purpose. Why does your company even exist, right? ah And it is you do have to work hard. You have very few resources. You have to wear a lot of hats in a startup. I think making sure that the you know the founders, you know, it's it's going to be really hard to expect other folks to have the kind of, you know, buy in or, or you know,
01:10:29
Speaker
investment and they're not going to be invested in your vision and your dream and everything as much as you are because you're the one who tends to make the most money. So if they do have some skin in the game of equity or options and those sort of things, I think that does help a lot. But yeah, just expecting people to work 80 hours a week to make you rich, I would definitely go skip it on that because that kind of culture is not sustainable if you are goingnna you are going to build a business beyond the startup you know uh stage or phase of your of your business you can't sustain that with that that that kind of hustle culture you're gonna burn people out and it's just it's just not a fun like it won't be a fun place to work yeah and you'll get a bad reputation in the market you'll struggle to get uh good people and so on so forth so yeah that's i want i want employees that are there because they love it and they've got skin in the game uh so
01:11:24
Speaker
Yep. I am also a skip it on this. Um, because if you've done well in hiring and done well managing the expectations, you shouldn't need to have this hustle culture because everybody will be on the same page. They're all going to want to drive towards getting this thing out the door on their own without being told that they have to move faster. that You don't need that person over your shoulder going done yet, done yet the whole time. Um, and I do agree it will burn anybody involved out. um The expectation should be set up front that you're going to have to wear multiple hats. We don't have the kind of manpower in a startup to ah you know fill in all the slots. You're not going to have full teams. You may have to be QA one day and product manager the next day. And um in that's just the expectation. So come in expecting to have a a ah ah change of hat at any given moment.
01:12:24
Speaker
But we you know you have to believe in the product and and we have to move forward as as as quickly as possible without you know i'm burning everybody out. ah And i I really think you know with that passion culture, you need that play hard.
01:12:41
Speaker
more card kind of mentality, just so that you can like let go and reset. Because if you don't recharge the batteries, they're just going to go empty, and you're going to be dead on the side of the road, right? And and I think you make a really important point about setting expectations up front. The last guy that I hired, I tried to talk him out of taking the position. So when he ah came on, he was actually working for Meta. um And I said, you don't want this job.
01:13:11
Speaker
And here's why. And I went through all the reasons why this was, you know, not something he would want to do. And in the end, he was like, I still want to do it. It's like, all right, but then you know what you're getting into.
01:13:25
Speaker
But, you know, I'm not lying to you when I say, you know, it's high speed, low drag, wear a lot of hats, whatever the case is. And if you're not up for that kind of culture, then it's not a good fit. And so, yeah, totally agreed that you have to set those expectations up front. And that's part of building the passion within your team. All right. Our next one on the ship it or skip it list is relying on open source technologies.
01:13:54
Speaker
ship it. I do a lot of stuff with open source. I always have. ah In fact, i we had a practice that I was running, which was our free and open source software practice.
01:14:09
Speaker
um As long as you're using it ah to the licenses correctly um and you are um keeping abreast of any security vulnerabilities that are found in updating, I think it's it's a great model. um I like even more the models of um that have commercial support ah behind them. you know Red Hat is doing stuff like that. i have a We're using a database. um from ah ah It's like a free version of Mongo Enterprise from a company called Percona that takes the ah downstream community version of Mongo and adds all the enterprise features to it.
01:14:53
Speaker
and releases that as open source, and then charges for ah support and services around that. um So there's there's a lot of great ah lot of great ways that you can leverage open source. And truthfully, I think open is better from a security perspective. um because you're going to have more eyes looking at it and people that want to make a name for themselves by ah finding vulnerabilities and and fixing them. So um you don't end up with vendors that recognize they have security vulnerabilities and just try to hide it.
01:15:30
Speaker
Well, and you get, you get a wider market of implementations too. So you get, you know, a lot of times with open source, it's, it's used in multiple different areas instead of just like a niche one that maybe, um, a certain technology that is a a pay for off the shelf might have. yeah So obviously I'm a, I'm a ship it as well. I've been using open source since I could.
01:15:55
Speaker
you know It started off because I was cheap, um but you know as communities grown and things have gotten better, ah it has proven to be you know more resilient, more commonplace, and in you are able to find people that understand the technology a lot easier than if you're using something that is very niche, right? So like a good example was like the the Lotus suite of tools. I mean, there was always job postings for those, but unless you had an opportunity to work on it, you're not going to be in and that niche. Where if you had open source tools in that you were using for your solution,
01:16:41
Speaker
you were easily able to find developers that had used it before, have used it for their own projects and things like that. So I think you know there's there's that side benefit of of being able to find folks that know that technology as well. Yep, absolutely. So this was near and dear to my heart, I guess, and and I see both sides. so I'm a longtime member of the Apache Software Foundation, done a lot of work in open source and and for the individual to get involved as the contributor to get involved in open source, it have you have to be doing it because you you want to do it, right? You can't be getting into it for the money or it because it's open source. There's really not a lot of money in it. There can be if you do it.
01:17:21
Speaker
another way ah i guess the the reason i brought it up is you know there's a there's a lot of stuff going around like or going on where companies will develop an entire business around an open source product and they won't contribute to the i'm doing air quotes to the upstream right so to the court to the root product the open source product um and then they'll they'll just build a business around it and you know you've seen all of this kind of We're going to change our license so they can't make money off of our hard work and all this stuff. And that that gets a little crazy. So I think there's a little bit of risk involved there. But I would i would encourage people, if you are going to be using open source, especially for startups and that sort of contribute back as much as you can, be a part of the community and contribute things back.
01:18:03
Speaker
Where it starts to get a little wonky for me from a contributor level would be when when those business folks that do contribute back start to like kind of almost abuse their influence over the product and the and the project and and and kind of steer their own business interests into the open source thing ah so that you're you're just basically feeding your own business interests and that's where it gets a little ugly and and there are cases of that. At least I've seen it and in my opinion that's what was going on but Um, i I do think I would use open source, but I would encourage people to absolutely try to get back as much as you can. Yeah. So the last one, this this was kind of interesting. I was just kind of doing a little chat GPT and, and of different things that could be controversial in the startup world. What about adopting agile or agile slash scrum in a startup environment?
01:18:54
Speaker
Well, um I'm going to age myself here, and I'm going to say ah both skip it and ship it. right So my my modus operandi for ah things is to use a waterfall approach until I get to the development. you know So discover, design, develop, deploy, right the four Ds. I think discover, design, um and deploy um are ah great ways for ah Using a more traditional waterfall approach um i think it rating over a set of ah development during the development cycle is a smart way of of doing it.
01:19:41
Speaker
um so Generally, the way that I've done things is I will create a project plan in Gantt charts, in old school, um to try to get an idea of scope and cost and timelines, and then go in during the development phase and use... um i've We've used Trello ah pretty successfully, more of a Kanban type um thing where you're moving cards from one ah one stack to another. ah And during that phase, that works really well to keep everybody on the same page and then people can pick up um other things to work on if they run out of things and so forth. So um I do a um that type of approach. So I'm not sure if I can say ship it or skip it because it's I think it's a um it's not ah an either or, I think it's an and.
01:20:40
Speaker
Yeah, I'm, I am a ship it on agile, skip it on scrum. Um, and with, with some of the same things, you you need to have your discovery phase, uh, in there. Uh, once you, once you've had a successful discovery and you continue, go move into can continuous planning, um, and then.
01:21:04
Speaker
With that, I think a Kanban methodology is better for a startup because then as the work comes in, you can just pull off the top. and in If you built your team in a startup fashion where you' you've got those people that are wearing multiple hats,
01:21:20
Speaker
It's just take the most important thing and run with it. you know Just go, go, go. right and And just burn down that stack, get to MVP, rinse and repeat, and can and then move into your iterations. As you grow larger, then maybe Scrum works better for you at that point. But I think you know for that sake of being able to move through and and pivot quickly, I think that the Kanban is going to be more of a ah better style. I know with projects I do that I'm, i'm you know, with small teams and things like that, and the the that kind of thinking is better because then I don't have to worry about the management of sprints and trying to time base things and and all that in in having the ceremony around something that
01:22:16
Speaker
As a startup, you just don't have your ceremonies in place. that You're still trying to figure things out. So, um, I'm a, I'm a ship in skip as well, but, um, on the agile side, yeah, I definitely need that discovery up front so that we know what we're doing, you know, you got to have that discovery phase. And we just did an episode all about discovery and why it's important. So, um, you know, go check that out.
01:22:42
Speaker
Our little shameless plug there. absolutely Yeah. I mean, I haven't even, anybody was talking to me for five minutes, probably heard me say something along the lines of big A agile versus little A agile. So I'm all for agility. I don't know if I'm for, you know, what, what I know consultant, we're a consulting company, but I know consulting companies get a bad rap for, you know, selling big A agile right here from it and do these for instance.
01:23:06
Speaker
Been a very lucrative business for folks throughout through the years and it's caused agile to get a bad name, but I think we if you stick kind of the to the principle level of agile, I absolutely. I would value that in a startup and I think it's good to get those habits going early and not rely on.
01:23:22
Speaker
um you know we've got We got to write down everything in requirements, definition, and and a huge document in order before we can start writing any code or or or getting in anything in front of our users. So that analysis paralysis, it it just gets worse over time. So I would definitely build in agility into my company uh if i was trying to get a ah product out to market in in front of my customers as quickly as i can uh i think that that's important scrum maybe later maybe that's a big yeah maybe uh maybe not uh one of the things scrum they say that that it helps with is that you know kind of that cross team planning and coordination is what scrum's supposed to help with but and anyone like safe or something like that but
01:24:05
Speaker
Stick to the principles, go Kanban's daily. I would be careful with Kanban. They always say, us developers, we're like a gas. We expand to fill up any space you give us. That's what we do, right? That's why the sprints don't work if they're four weeks, six weeks long a lot of times, because we're like, oh, I got six weeks to do this one little story. No, you don't. You got as long as it takes you to do it, right? Just do the work.
01:24:32
Speaker
So anyway, yeah, I'm I'm I'm ship it on little a agile or or agility as a principle Yeah, I think it's in a lot of I think what all of us have said is skip the dogma and um go with the um the spirit of it um so and that's Yeah, exactly be pragmatic not dogmatic. I've said that to our folks a lot. Okay, that's perfect Okay I believe it's time for the lightning round.
Conclusion and Farewells
01:25:22
Speaker
So our lightning round is going to be a series of quick rapid fire questions. I guess quick and rapid is redundant. where we're going to each give you a question. We're not looking for long answer forms, just a snappy little answer. um There are definitely some right and wrong answers. um if If you've got the little seat shocker ah kit that we sent out to you, wrong answers will be buzzed.
01:25:53
Speaker
I was told there'd be no test involved here. We We just said there would be no math. There will be no math. That's all there is. There's no math section. I don't think. I do see a question about pie in here, though. Pecan pie over Apple every time. Yeah. All right. James, why don't you kick us off? All right. Favorite childhood TV show? The Flintstones.
01:26:23
Speaker
What's the most boring thing ever? Bowling. Watching bowling on TV. Oh. That's probably a better way of saying it. Do you know how to salsa dance? ah No. Or any other type of dance. Are tomatoes a fruit or a vegetable? They are a fruit. What was your first celebrity crush? Oh gosh, Farrah Fawcett.
01:26:51
Speaker
I had a poster of her in my bedroom as a kid. yeah We would have also accepted, well was it Heather Thomas from the fall guy? Was that her name? Is that Locklear? Heather Locklear. Yeah, that's not a good answer. We would have accepted any of those. OK. No buzzing necessary. I haven't gotten zapped yet, so I guess you're doing we're go great. Yeah, I think mine is Daisy Duke. Oh, OK. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's that's acceptable. It could be Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island, too. Yeah.
01:27:23
Speaker
ah Is it grammatically proper to capitalize the names of the seasons? Yes, I would say so. Man, you're ki making difficult. I'm throwing the hard balls today. I know. Do you have any friends taller than 6'4"? Yes. A good friend of mine, Joe, is 6'7".
01:27:47
Speaker
Good night. yeah Dan is the one I think of when I think of over 6'4". Guy had the duck in every room he walked into. My son's 6'7", and he's going to Japan in a couple of weeks, so it's going to be an interesting ah experience for him there. Six month internship in Japan, so he's going to come back hunched over. Yeah, right. He's not going to fit anywhere. um Most embarrassing story you might be seen shopping at.
01:28:16
Speaker
Wow. That's a great question. I'm going to go with, I would have said Kmart, but I think they're out of business now. So yeah um I guess it would ah be the discount liquor and cigarette store across the river. This is a timely one. How do you feel about cranberries? Oh yeah.
01:28:37
Speaker
Um, I like, uh, them jelly, but I don't like them, uh, cooked. So I like cranberry jelly, uh, out of a can plop. Um, but that's about the only way I like it now. And why did the ends taste better? You know what I mean? Like, why is that? I've not experienced that. I've that's the first I've heard that.
01:29:00
Speaker
We always fight over who gets the ends that that like molded to the, well, now I'm going to have to taste test it. That's where all the botulism is that extra flavor there and at the seals of the can. and That's where all the yeah okay. That's good. That must be what it is. the tick All right. This is, this is kind of relevant along those same lane, uh, along the same lines. Do you Instagram your food?
01:29:30
Speaker
No, i I don't Instagram at all, actually. So, yeah. I think that finished our lightning round. um We're done. You survived. Well, I didn't get shocked. So I'm feeling I'm shocked that I wasn't shocked. So you did great. Fantastic. ah Gold star. Wow. Thank you. It's I think you're the highest score this week. OK. Well, good. Yeah, definitely the highest score this week. Yeah. And yeah this is your only one this week, right?
01:29:59
Speaker
Oh, it could be ah So far. know The day ain't over yet. We're right. That's awesome. Well, that concludes this episode of the Forward Slash, where we lean into the future of IT. t Make sure you subscribe to this podcast for future episodes. I'd like to thank our guest, Rich Schramm, for talking with us about entrepreneurship in the health care industry. I'd also like to thank my beautiful co-host, James, and all of our production staff that make this podcast possible.
01:30:30
Speaker
I'm Aaron Chesney, thank you and stay curious.