Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Fractional Frequency, our take on talent, people trends, and the reality of building up businesses in an economy that keeps rewriting the rules.
Speaker: I'm Amy Crook, founder of Strativist.
Speaker: And I'm Erin Totis, managing
Speaker: the right people to make an impact for our clients fast.
Speaker: Around here, we talk about the real side of HR and talent, what works, what absolutely doesn't, and how to build teams that can carry a business, not drag it down.
Speaker: We'll break down trends, share the behind the scenes of scaling a consultancy from zero, and probably overshare a little because that's where the good lessons live.
Speaker: So whether you're building, hiring, leading, or just trying to keep your company profitable, you're in the right place.
Speaker: This is fractional frequency.
Speaker: Let's get to it.
Speaker: Joe Silver joining us for the podcast.
Speaker: And Joe is a high level expert in cybersecurity with real world experience in both the defense and private sectors.
Speaker: And now Joe has turned his talents towards entrepreneurship as the founder and CEO of Spectrum, a cybersecurity software firm.
Speaker: And as a career long fan of corporate HR, it was only natural that we would have him on to talk about all the value adds of HR.
Speaker: So welcome, Joe.
Speaker: Thanks for having me in here.
Speaker: Looking forward to this.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: Joe, do you remember the first time you and I met?
Speaker: I believe so.
Speaker: I think I was railing about the lack
Speaker: of utility in TransUnion TA.
Speaker: But that, I mean, that's a wild guess, but a pretty good one because I railed about it.
Speaker: Yeah, it was, it was definitely my most interesting meeting when I first started at TransUnion.
Speaker: You essentially
Speaker: let me know that you weren't quite sure why I was here because you did all the hiring for your own function anyway.
Speaker: And talent acquisition is essentially useless.
Speaker: And I burst out laughing because I did not know what to say.
Speaker: Well, that was when I thought I was going to have to pay you a commission on the hires I was making.
Speaker: And then when I found out that it was essentially free from me, my attitude challenge.
Speaker: Then it seemed like good value at the free price tag.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Talk us through like what you've been up to since those TransUnion days.
Speaker: Well, since my glorious tour of duty running cybersecurity at TransUnion, I moved over to JLL, the large global corporate commercial real estate firm.
Speaker: You know, I led security there for almost three years.
Speaker: I was the CISO there.
Speaker: until summer of 2024 when I joined with my co-founders who had also worked at JLL and TransUnion with me to start Spection, the company I'm CEO of now.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: And what was the push that made you want to go from being in a company to running your own business?
Speaker: Before I was at TransUnion, I had been on the vendor side.
Speaker: And while I was at TransUnion, I was actually entertaining a number of options to go back there.
Speaker: Probably at something smaller, not maybe something I'd start myself.
Speaker: But then a lot of conversations with my co-founders, ideas we had, just gaps we saw.
Speaker: in terms of what like the cybersecurity product market was offering us vis-a-vis like the challenges we dealt with every day.
Speaker: We thought we had some unique insights and I, you know, before the dawn of like Claudecote, I couldn't build a damn thing myself and they could essentially, they could build anything.
Speaker: And, you know, but at a high level, it was, you know, I wanted to do three things.
Speaker: And I, when I joined JLL, I knew I was going to leave and go do something else.
Speaker: Uh,
Speaker: or that I started or another one.
Speaker: So I, you know, I'd kind of already mentally prepared myself, ramped up for it.
Speaker: But at a high level, it was, you know, I wanted a few things kind of out of, you know, like this portion of my career.
Speaker: I wanted to do work that I actually wanted to do.
Speaker: I can talk more about that, you know, in a minute.
Speaker: But I wanted to do it with the people I wanted to do it with, which were my co-founders and like our early hires.
Speaker: And I wanted to get out of it what I put into it.
Speaker: And that last part, I was very well compensated.
Speaker: There's a lot of, not a lot, but a vocal minority of CISOs who were talking about how tough the job is.
Speaker: that's what the money's for, right?
Speaker: So like, hey, if your job is to be the chief digital janitor and you're paid like seven figures for it, I think that's a pretty good gig.
Speaker: Just shut up and pick up the trash.
Speaker: Nobody wants to hear about this great gum off the floor.
Speaker: But
Speaker: I wanted to do it with the people I wanted to do it with.
Speaker: And I would say at both TransUnion and JLL, I had the good fortune because of the leadership of both those companies are really building teams.
Speaker: I was brought there to build up programs.
Speaker: And so there was a certain degree of entrepreneurial culture in terms of what we were doing that.
Speaker: We built operations that we thought needed to be built for the problems at hand.
Speaker: We essentially probably created
Speaker: make me a very good executive for having done that lesson learned, right?
Speaker: Especially if it's totally orthogonal to the corporate culture.
Speaker: But also, I just know this about myself where I'm not good at being a support person.
Speaker: And, you know, by that, I mean, you know, I had a career in the military and then as a civilian in the intelligence community and operations world.
Speaker: And I'm good at
Speaker: Being in the role that the organization is about.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, I think I was mildly effective as a CISO.
Speaker: You know, your mileage may vary on your take.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, like if you're in the Air Force, if I'm in the Air Force, I need to be a pilot.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If I'm in the Army, I need to be an operator.
Speaker: I need to be an operations officer, right?
Speaker: I'm just best.
Speaker: I'm happiest when I feel like my success directly maps to the organization's mission.
Speaker: And obviously the easiest way to do that is to start and run your own company.
Speaker: Yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker: Was there like a specific moment?
Speaker: I mean, you said that you already knew going into your CISO position that you weren't going to stay forever.
Speaker: But was there a specific moment or frustration that pushed you a certain time to go into your own business?
Speaker: I mean, I don't know that I had this like moment of clarity, right?
Speaker: Like an alcoholic hitting rock bottom or anything.
Speaker: There's probably a whole series of moments where, you know, like most people you say, I can't believe that I work for this person or that this is my job, or you think, am I getting dumber by doing this?
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: So I don't, you know, it's probably very incremental.
Speaker: I would say the moment
Speaker: was, and it really made it a lot easier because my co-founders were taking the leap with me when we were just talking and we realized we could actually, like, we could do this, right?
Speaker: You know, like I said, a lot easier.
Speaker: I didn't just go off on my own.
Speaker: You know, I went off with other people who had as much, if not more, to lose than I did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it definitely is tough to do it alone.
Speaker: When I made the decision to do this, I was on my own for a whole month.
Speaker: It was intense, but then I was...
Speaker: very fortunate that erin came along with me um so you talked about going back to being um part of an organization a vendor um rather than uh your own business but what was the it was was it the decision that you guys came up with this great idea that you knew could solve a problem so it just made it simple uh even though the risk of doing your own thing is definitely higher
Speaker: You know, it wasn't like I felt like we had this aha moment where like we arrived at, you know, the idea to do exactly what we're doing now.
Speaker: I mean, you know, we thought about just big problems, you know, and probably not germane to most of your audience, but we were just thinking about real gaps and how organizations can identify and manage vulnerabilities.
Speaker: systems.
Speaker: But it was when I realized that, you know, my co-founders weren't just the folks I can build this with, but they were the people who, and I'd known like they were already like tireless workers, you know, not going to be easily demoralized, but also that they could be as flexible as we would need to be because we knew that we had an idea and where we ended up wasn't going to be where we started.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it was kind of when I, you know, when I did my own mental math and I did my risk model around this and I, and I realized that they're going to be able to pivot with me, you know, as much as the business requires.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that's super important.
Speaker: Going back to what you said about, you know, wanting to do, wanting to do work with people that you want to do work with.
Speaker: And when you go into your own business, being super flexible about what you're focused on and when, because it does, it does change.
Speaker: And even though it's a completely different space, we've been through that journey too of what we thought was going to be our focus and where we'd spend time.
Speaker: most of our time has changed significantly just in the last six months.
Speaker: So it's a real interesting, interesting journey.
Speaker: I know Erin's got some questions for you, but I just want to reassure people that perhaps were worried that Joe spent the next like three and a half years bullying me while we were at TransUnion.
Speaker: He did, but I am happy to say that
Speaker: One of my final meetings that I had with Joe, he gave me the very high praise of telling me he didn't hate working with me.
Speaker: And I was like, thank you.
Speaker: It stuck with me forever.
Speaker: Clearing your memory.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think, you know, we've lately, we've talked a lot about leadership on this podcast and, and also about what it feels like to become a founder and some of the trade-offs that people don't necessarily warn you about.
Speaker: And so Joe, I've got, I've got some questions for you along that vein.
Speaker: Is there anything to kick us off?
Speaker: Is there anything that you underestimated about becoming a founder?
Speaker: And if so, what were those things?
Speaker: I probably did.
Speaker: And I just am not introspective enough to realize it when it comes to myself, but you know, when I, I'll just kind of speak a little more broadly.
Speaker: Here's one of the things I just realized, right.
Speaker: You know, when you're leading like, you know, teams of a couple hundred folks, uh, versus starting with a smaller team, you know, and I had worked on like small teams in the military is that, um, you know, you have to be
Speaker: alignment or not at all.
Speaker: And, you know, like I'm continuously impressed at like how a lot of our early employees like, like do amazing things, right?
Speaker: Like you hear phrases and like tech world about 10 X engineers and things like that.
Speaker: But I've seen some folks who just go above and beyond it, both in terms of like what they do and like their commitment.
Speaker: But then I've also just seen how with some employees, you know, and
Speaker: You can mitigate, you know, employees, maybe, you know, having a tough time and still get the most out of them.
Speaker: But it's really binary in the startup world.
Speaker: You are either amazing or you're not a fit.
Speaker: And it may just be you're not a fit, you know, for me and to deal with my BS, right?
Speaker: No way.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: That's kind of a non-negotiable.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Would I...
Speaker: What I really underestimated was the extent to which, again, some people will do amazing things and far exceed your expectations.
Speaker: And for other people, it's just not a good fit.
Speaker: And you will often recognize it before they do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so, you know, on that, on that topic, is there anything that you would say has changed about how you lead people after becoming a founder?
Speaker: Yeah, I probably lead people a lot more like I did when I was like earlier in my career before I was in the private sector.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And that like, hey, here's the mission.
Speaker: Here's what we have to do.
Speaker: Yeah, there is a lot of like accountability on you.
Speaker: And, you know, and you have to give people the opportunity to either, you know, crash or like reach the stratosphere very quickly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you have to be willing to call it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: very, very quickly.
Speaker: I think that's, that's important.
Speaker: And honestly, it's the most fair thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: To the employee, because you honestly don't have the time to not go through all the administrative hurdles from HR perspective that you do.
Speaker: That's not really a big deal, at least if it hasn't been for us, it's more about, you don't have the time to kind of coach people along and
Speaker: successful yeah but uh you have to recognize one if people are going to succeed or not in the role they're in and then two is there a role like because a lot of folks maybe are just in the wrong role but could be tremendous contributors and where that is and if you can't figure it out um they're not going to figure it out without you doing it and it's just not a fit
Speaker: Yeah, and that's such a good point.
Speaker: There's just no time where you have more, like, I hate to use this term, but like more runway for things to get completed and there's more people contributing and, you know, you can have like people that are a little bit slower to move or
Speaker: um and not able to like fully take ownership of a decision or an action themselves they want to you know talk it through you can have that in corporate but when you're in a startup there's there's no time for for any of that it's like you have to complete x and you have to figure it out like i can't i can't sit with you and figure it out with you because i'm figuring out my own problems
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And some, and, you know, and maybe it's not necessarily fair, which is why I try to be as transparent about it, you know, in the hiring process, right?
Speaker: Like, Hey, the, there's no way, like we could go through a battery of like four hours of interviews and practical exercises and things like that, but that's not really going to determine whether or not you're a fit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, the first, you know, a couple of months on the job,
Speaker: is really the actual interview process.
Speaker: And some folks, they call it themselves, right?
Speaker: Like they're like, hey, I thought it was for me.
Speaker: You know, I'm introspective enough and self-aware enough that I get it.
Speaker: It's not for me right now.
Speaker: And you know, that's great.
Speaker: And sometimes they don't, you know, and in the corporate world, you would a lot of times try to bring them along, right?
Speaker: You just don't have time to do that.
Speaker: all in my drawer here beside me.
Speaker: I'll just crush it up and pull up a dollar in it.
Speaker: I'll make the time.
Speaker: It's the opportunity cost of what else you could be getting done.
Speaker: That's what you don't really have.
Speaker: And folks can sense it.
Speaker: And the other
Speaker: motivated high performers.
Speaker: Not to say that folks who aren't a fit aren't high performers, it's just maybe not in the context of the role of the company.
Speaker: But like, I worry, you know, other than deal flow, there's nothing I worry about more than the morale of like our best folks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And their well-being.
Speaker: So yeah, and it definitely impacts people.
Speaker: Sorry, Aaron, I was just going to say it definitely impacts those around you.
Speaker: If, you know,
Speaker: somebody's not quite getting it at the same pace.
Speaker: It's really noticeable in this kind of environment.
Speaker: And yeah, it's everybody needs to be on the same page and pulling, pulling the same way.
Speaker: It's, it's tough when it's, when it doesn't, when it doesn't work out.
Speaker: And I'm, I'm very willing to believe there's oftentimes where like, I'm just not the right vessel to communicate what needs to be done and how and in what way, but I'm,
Speaker: an army of one, so to speak.
Speaker: So if I can't figure it out, I can't figure out how to make somebody successful.
Speaker: And, you know, they're either extrinsically motivated or they need that support.
Speaker: It's just not going to happen.
Speaker: That's the fairest thing for everybody is to just call it as soon as possible.
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: I've got sort of a talent related question just creeping into my mind.
Speaker: And so I'll go off, off our outline for a moment here, but I feel like
Speaker: Amy and my journey has been a real lesson in some of the behaviors or sort of qualities that make people successful in this type of an environment.
Speaker: And I, for a long time, had held this belief that if you had a killer work ethic and a positive attitude, you could figure anything out, maybe outside of technology anyway.
Speaker: But is there anything that's changed about your beliefs in terms of
Speaker: critical qualities that you now see as very important or that you now prioritize over other things as you're hiring for your team?
Speaker: I mean, beyond the things you mentioned, right, great attitude, great work ethic, you know, I would say like a technical criteria is like, there's probably two things.
Speaker: One is just your willingness to like refactor your opinions and learn.
Speaker: That's particularly important.
Speaker: when it comes to like, you know, how do you get leverage out of like adopting AI, which every couple of months there's a new equation, right?
Speaker: Like there's a lot of people early who were, you know, rightfully kind of AI deniers.
Speaker: And you have to be willing to just rethink your stance on that.
Speaker: That's one.
Speaker: The other is, you know, when you're in a startup, uh,
Speaker: things are going to change, right?
Speaker: Like, hey, we thought we were going to do X. Now we're getting signals we're going to do Y. Some of it's like actual signals from the market.
Speaker: Some of it's intuition.
Speaker: And that creates like some ambiguity.
Speaker: So you have to have employees who have a tolerance for ambiguity.
Speaker: You know, they're intrinsically motivated by doing a great job because they love what they're doing.
Speaker: But at the same time,
Speaker: You know, they can be, they can have comfort with understanding that, hey, things are going to change, right?
Speaker: And what success looks like for the company is going to change, how that translates to what they deliver is going to change, right?
Speaker: They just are intrinsically motivated by doing awesome work.
Speaker: And if then, you know, and if the purpose of that work changes, that's fine because that's not really their focus.
Speaker: Yeah, now it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker: And everything that you're saying just rings so true, even though it's a completely different space, but the work ethic, the attitude, the operating in ambiguity, I think those are just so like a thread between all startups that you have to possess those qualities, those behaviors to be able to tolerate
Speaker: the working environment.
Speaker: Some people like really thrive off that and some people just find it way too complex to unpick and find their way through.
Speaker: I mean, there's also the comfort.
Speaker: I'm sorry to cut you off.
Speaker: Oh, go on.
Speaker: Go on.
Speaker: You know, another thing is just you just have to have comfort with like a ton of, I don't want to say scrutiny, but just transparency into what you're getting done every day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Where.
Speaker: Yeah, like and every day is not going to be a win, right.
Speaker: Or you're going to do things that, you know, in retrospect, maybe didn't work out or they're just rendered obsolete by new things.
Speaker: You know, so you have to be very invested in the work you're doing when you're doing it.
Speaker: You cannot be overly emotionally invested in the work you did.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you have to be comfortable with being under the microscope, not because you're working for micromanagers, but just because everybody sees everything that everyone's doing.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Every day is selection.
Speaker: Every day is a selection.
Speaker: That sounds so harsh, but it's so true.
Speaker: And I think as well, it's funny because there was a couple of things that Aaron and I kind of went through on this journey.
Speaker: One is that our work ethic, our attitude, our ability to operate in ambiguity is like super strong.
Speaker: What
Speaker: just came to my mind with what you just said was that bit around, you know, when something doesn't work.
Speaker: That was kind of a newer, like newer experience, because we're used to like going into organizations when things are really broken, making
Speaker: like big impacts quick quick changes getting our pat on the head and you know everybody's happy at the end of the day and it's not like that every like you say every day is a new thing and you're not going to win every day and so the resilience piece i think was was big for for us not because
Speaker: you know, we, we don't like feedback or we're not, we're, we do, we love that, you know, we want to get better and we want to add a ton of value to everyone that we work with, but the, the pace of how quickly we were able to make an impact in our sector, in our industry was just slower than we anticipated.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't want to talk for you, Aaron, but does that kind of like ring true to you?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that your definition of success has to change.
Speaker: And I think it's a lesson that you can really only learn the hard way.
Speaker: But I'd be curious, Joe, for your take on that, too.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I kind of knew this going in because I had worked with so many startups and had friends that had done them before.
Speaker: And even the most successful ones, one, you only hear about them when they reach success, right, and everything works.
Speaker: you know, when the narrative ends up being everything was up and to the right.
Speaker: You know, so there's a huge selection bias in terms of the stories you actually hear about.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But also, you know, like, I'm highly confident, you know, that you all, like, you know, Spectrum are going to be, like, very successful.
Speaker: Like it's not going to feel like it's even at the end when you're successful, the way there is not going to feel like, oh, it was a smooth glide path there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I had already kind of prepared myself for that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And what you don't, you don't want to overprepare because then you become too accepting of defeats.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, you know, you have to just be comfortable being unhappy and displeased with outcomes that you heavily invested yourself.
Speaker: and trying to create and just move on right it's like shooting free throws you just have to like worry about the next one yep so true and yeah the fifth the fifth knock like it hurt the second one we're just like all right well can't afford to be moping around gotta gotta get on with it and now i think we're we're better better for it like better operators better humans just um valuing different things which i think um
Speaker: has been a pretty cool change.
Speaker: Has there been any moments since you moved into your own space that you had any doubts?
Speaker: I mean, doubts in terms of, was this the right thing to do?
Speaker: Yeah, like doubts that you had not met.
Speaker: You know, I would, I have, I don't have doubts that it was the right thing to do because I, I mean, I just think I can get anything done, right?
Speaker: I probably have an unrealistic assessment of my capabilities to just figure it out and get stuff done.
Speaker: So not really, I mean, it's, you know, so every once in a while you, like I don't get too high or too low, right?
Speaker: And I think sometimes as a boss, it's maybe,
Speaker: to the detriment of the team.
Speaker: Like when there's a win, like I don't really celebrate.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, I'm happy for what we do.
Speaker: And I like to, you know, call out when we do something very great.
Speaker: But if you get too high, then you're also going to get too low.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I try to stay pretty modulated on that.
Speaker: Now, I do think
Speaker: largely driven by AI, everybody needs to think about being disintermediated, right?
Speaker: And hey, the thing that I was thinking where I was going to bring really unique value to the market is now maybe not going to exist or be commoditized or just be rendered, you know, not very valuable.
Speaker: But again, I think if you have probably totally unrealistic expectations of your ability to just figure it out and succeed,
Speaker: you've got a fighting chance, right?
Speaker: And I heard a saying that sticks with me because not a lot of people probably who know me would just say, oh yeah, he's a real optimist.
Speaker: But here's this phrase I remember at least once a week, which is, if you want to be right most of the time, be a pessimist.
Speaker: But if you want to be successful, be an optimist.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I it's it's everything you're saying I'm totally in agreement with.
Speaker: I had a call with somebody who I had been like having some sort of like mentor relationship with a few weeks ago and it was after maybe like the first big knock.
Speaker: And it was just, you know, I was just not in a good frame of mind.
Speaker: And the person said to me, okay, like when's your cut off date?
Speaker: Actually, they called it a drop dead date.
Speaker: They're like, when's your cut off date that you're just going to like give up?
Speaker: And I was like, excuse me?
Speaker: Like, that's not even in question.
Speaker: You know, this is going to work.
Speaker: Like, I know it's going to work.
Speaker: And I was just like, it really shocked me out of my little funk because I was like, no, no, no.
Speaker: We're not going down that road.
Speaker: Because, yeah, I think we've just, we've had that belief from day one that we're going to be successful.
Speaker: It's at times obnoxious, the plans that we have for ourselves going down the line.
Speaker: But I think you have to have that, like, faith in yourself to keep going, especially when those knocks come.
Speaker: Yeah, and you know what?
Speaker: This is a huge character flaw, probably.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: It was like a husband, father, and friend.
Speaker: But
Speaker: Like when things are really going downhill, like the job will be the lasting
Speaker: So far, my son doesn't hate me and my wife hasn't left me.
Speaker: So I haven't gotten any of those signals that things are about to come to a crashing halt yet.
Speaker: After those two things happen, maybe then I'll recalibrate.
Speaker: Yes, definitely need supportive family around you to tolerate the working hours.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, not just the hours, but it's just the, you know, the disengagement when you're not technically working.
Speaker: Like my wife,
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a huge component.
Speaker: It makes it a lot easier.
Speaker: Yeah, 100%.
Speaker: You mentioned earlier about ambiguity.
Speaker: And so I just wonder, like, how you personally make decisions when you have incomplete information?
Speaker: The answer is I just make a decision.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Again, I mean, kind of going back towards I'll figure it out.
Speaker: I'll make it.
Speaker: We'll make a decision.
Speaker: maybe there's a 45% chance it's wrong.
Speaker: It's just about how fast we recognize it.
Speaker: And the longer we go, I talked to my co-founder and CTO, Josh, about this.
Speaker: We just iterate much more quickly through failure.
Speaker: And so part of that's just kind of being deprogrammed from the corporate world where you just don't have the latitude to do that.
Speaker: And honestly, sometimes the sense of urgency is not as great.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Because the organizations themselves that you work at don't.
Speaker: and you're never going to have enough data points, I just say, okay, one, I have to make a decision as fast as possible so we can iterate through failure.
Speaker: And then two, like, is this a defensible decision, right?
Speaker: I was on a call today and we were talking about marketing and PR and, you know, I kind of had a hunch that something was the right thing to do.
Speaker: it you know i was talking through it uh with my marketing leader and just saying hey uh why is this a defensible decision if this completely fails like why was this defensible why was our rationale defensible yeah i think that is a really great tip like to ask yourself that question um i know we definitely make decisions quickly we like live with the mantra that the only bad decision is not making one at all um but yeah
Speaker: I think that's a good tip for people out there that are thinking about doing something similar is, you know, when you move quick, you have to just make sure that you can, you can talk to why should you need to.
Speaker: I think this is like a Bezos Amazon thing, but it's definitely true that very few decisions are one way doors.
Speaker: I mean, you need to
Speaker: if we make this decision right but that's very every decision you're going to make during the day is a two-way door yeah yeah it's good to remember that too so you've been going for a couple of years now so what what's harder the early days or now that you're scaling uh I definitely think
Speaker: It's harder in the early days because you're just not exactly sure what to do in terms of where to put your effort.
Speaker: There's a lot of advice you get.
Speaker: You know, there's kind of, you know, when you're starting a software company, you know, what roles you bring on when it's kind of like a template of what you're expected to do.
Speaker: And again, I think there's a lot of selection bias in terms of you can follow that playbook perfectly.
Speaker: and things will still not work out.
Speaker: If it did, every VC would only pick winners, right?
Speaker: If they just had them there to keep the playbook.
Speaker: So, you know, there's a lot of ambiguity and it wasn't like stressful, but just, you know, there's a lot more, there's a lot more learning going on, right?
Speaker: Still a ton of learning now, but you're, you know, the amount of, you know, one, you become more opinionated and confident in just your gut decisions.
Speaker: getting people aligned.
Speaker: Like I find the bigger the company gets, the more comfortable I am, not because I'm like insulated from things more or have less to do, but just because you kind of have more resources to play with.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And you can, you can fail faster, get more data points.
Speaker: And like people are so much, I mean, it's one is your company grows and you have more folks.
Speaker: Of course you have more things you need to get done.
Speaker: But when you combine that with like,
Speaker: of the productivity boon.
Speaker: And so now, like something I think about is, you know, everybody is always working all the time, right?
Speaker: That's kind of a given.
Speaker: Now we have great employees work really hard.
Speaker: But it's also just, is it the optimal use of their time, right?
Speaker: Like, hey, do you have, like, do we have agents running 24-7 doing everything they can be doing for us, right?
Speaker: And if not, you feel like you're leaving money on the table.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when you think about this journey, who shouldn't become a founder of a company?
Speaker: Well, like all the people that don't have the traits, I guess we talked about is a given.
Speaker: But, you know, like I'll tell you people, people who are like, I want to be my own boss.
Speaker: And maybe in some context, that's true, but.
Speaker: know, I feel like I work for everybody now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As opposed to in the corporate world where, you know, I just had to make sure my priorities were, you know, totally aligned with my boss's priorities.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And a lot of times in the corporate world, when you feel like that isn't the case, because maybe there's, you know, kind of competing priorities among like various levels of leadership, right.
Speaker: I've experienced where that could be frustrating.
Speaker: But in general, it's pretty easy.
Speaker: But for folks who think like, oh, I'm just going to be my own boss,
Speaker: I've had a lot of conversations with folks about where it's like founder is a lifestyle brand.
Speaker: You know, where they're so into being a founder.
Speaker: It's like CrossFit or being a vegan, right?
Speaker: Like you hear about it all the time.
Speaker: Very in vogue right now, yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, not only is it probably not mapped to the company's success, it's also like unbelievably unfair to your employees, right?
Speaker: Like if they're joining you and sacrificing a ton...
Speaker: So again, you can have this lifestyle brand or feel a certain way.
Speaker: Like that's absolutely the wrong person to do it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I mean, like obviously like multitasking, right.
Speaker: Task switching.
Speaker: That's, that's a given in terms of your ability to do that.
Speaker: And every founder is going to do something different, but let's just assume, and you know, we're like a venture backed startup.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's,
Speaker: You've got to, and you know, most startups don't start with like somebody on go to market, right?
Speaker: So if you're the CEO, you're typically go to market, right?
Speaker: Founders typically go to market.
Speaker: So you've got to have that comfort with talking to people, you know, dealing with, you know, just dealing with rejection of some sort, right?
Speaker: Negative feedback.
Speaker: Also like dealing with investors is totally different than dealing with potential customers, right?
Speaker: In terms of how you have to work with them and what they want to hear.
Speaker: Some of them want to be baffled with bullshit because they're getting bullshit all the time.
Speaker: Like I said, I am genuinely actually a pretty optimistic person, but I try to stay pretty grounded in my description of things, even though to myself, I see an amazing path for our company.
Speaker: You have to be willing to
Speaker: have different versions of yourself for different audiences for the, you know, the investor community, for the market, for your team.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so to try to stay like, to feel like you're always being genuine because, you know, most, I don't know very many people,
Speaker: that feel very good about themselves when they feel like they're being disingenuine.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So maybe if you have like minimal self-awareness, that's not a problem.
Speaker: But if you're a relatively introspective person and you still have discomfort with having to be different people, depending, you know, a different person, at least a different flavor of yourself, depending on the audience, that's going to, that's going to be tough.
Speaker: Like I'm fortunate where,
Speaker: You know, from like my time in the government, I kind of learned to be whoever the other person needed me to be.
Speaker: But it's still, you still have to learn how to do that.
Speaker: And, you know, if you just want to live your truth and be your authentic self, 100% of the time with every audience, you're, you know.
Speaker: This is not for you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's probably not.
Speaker: It's probably not for you.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now, I like to think of it more like I'm meeting my audience where they're at rather than like I have some kind of personality disorder, but it could be both.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It could be.
Speaker: I like to think of it like I'm three-dimensional and the part of me you see depends on like you're just seeing like you're seeing me from one angle.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's me.
Speaker: You're just not getting 360, Jeff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I guess my last question is, if you had to do it all again, what would you do sooner?
Speaker: I just would have done it sooner.
Speaker: I just, we, I just would have started sooner.
Speaker: No, there were a lot of reasons, right?
Speaker: There was like some economic security that I wanted to make sure I had.
Speaker: Yeah, that's real.
Speaker: We wanted to
Speaker: You know, it's funny, you want to have, you want to get to a point where you feel like you have such high confidence in the idea you're going to execute on, although you're going to almost always iterate through that idea.
Speaker: And it's, you know, two years later, you're going to be like, what were we thinking?
Speaker: So probably just would have done, would have done it sooner.
Speaker: You know, like there's micro, there's a lot of mistakes.
Speaker: Like I said, you know, it's failing fast and trying to fail faster.
Speaker: I would have failed faster almost every
Speaker: Every failure I had, I would have failed faster at.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I think we'll, we'll wrap our conversation with maybe just one more question.
Speaker: I'm, I, for one, I'm excited to follow Spectron and the continued growth ahead.
Speaker: What would you say, Joe, as you look back over the last couple of years, what are you most proud of building so far within your company?
Speaker: Honestly, I think we've,
Speaker: You know, we built a, I think, a pretty strong culture.
Speaker: Of course, I'm biased, right?
Speaker: And I could just be delusional on this.
Speaker: I doubt it.
Speaker: Your teams were always so loyal.
Speaker: Like, they loved you.
Speaker: So I'm sure it's exactly the same now.
Speaker: Well, I don't know that they would all say that, but I appreciate that.
Speaker: But honestly, I'm really proud of the trust we built with Comfort.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, I had good relationships with folks there, but I think that our customers really feel that we're focused on them and that, you know, typically that's something you lose at scale and we haven't lost it yet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As we work more and more companies.
Speaker: So I'm like really proud of like the trust they have, our customers have in us.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker: And as I think about, Joe, your brand and just our conversation today, what comes to mind first is just the sort of direct clarity and matter of fact confidence that you carry in everything that you say.
Speaker: And I think that probably translates to trust built fast and lasting over time with your customer base.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or at least the facade is holding, Erin.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Well, perception is reality.
Speaker: We're talking about that today, too.
Speaker: But no, I think, you know, to Amy's point, she's watched you for a long time with your teams and with customers, and it holds true.
Speaker: But it has been just a joy to dive into conversation with you.
Speaker: If listeners are interested in following your journey, Joe, or in learning more about you, where can they find out more or follow you?
Speaker: Uh, probably the best place to follow the company and me is LinkedIn, right?
Speaker: Joseph Silva, LinkedIn, Spection with a K. Um, uh, on LinkedIn and obviously, you know, spection.com, but not nearly as dynamic as probably, you know, our, our LinkedIn presence for both me and the company.
Speaker: Okay, perfect.
Speaker: Well, it's been so great to get to pick your brain, Joe.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Um, have a fantastic evening and we're looking forward to
Speaker: following your continued success.
Speaker: Thanks so much.
Speaker: Thank you for letting me join you both.
Speaker: This was great.
