Jason Moss.

What I've found out in my career is the key to upward success is not to keep all the plates spinning, but know what plates need to keep spinning and what plates can crash. Hello everyone, Simon Dudley here again for the Before It Was Obvious podcast. You obviously know that because you wouldn't have clicked on this link otherwise. However, today's guest is an old friend of mine, and we'll get into how we know each other and why ~ later. But welcome, Jason Moss. Thanks, Simon. Happy to be here. Good man. It's good to see you, my friend. So ~ clearly you and I have known each other for more than a couple of hours. but the ladies and gentlemen aren't going to. So why don't we start with who are you and what do you do today? Okay. Yeah, ~ Jason Moss. So we covered that already, but ~ I work for Acuity Inc. so Acuity is a large industrial technology company that recently acquired QSE. And so most people in the industry would know me as leading marketing and ecosystem for QSE, which I did for about five years, and then we were acquired about eighteen months ago. ~ and then Acuity being a large industrial technology company, they're actually the largest lighting manufacturer in North America. but then also they have this acuity intelligence spaces division, which includes BMS, so building management system controller solutions, different software applications for energy, sustainability, wayfinding data applications all around the build space, plus now AV with QSE. So I'm doing the same job I was doing at QSE of leading marketing and ecosystem, but for the entirety of the AQD intelligence spaces portfolio. So that's what I'm doing today. Right. Now, anyone who's ever watched a show before will know that what we now do is we go, We're gonna guess that you didn't wake up one morning at the age of five and go, You know what, I want to be the brand manager for a large building management organization. You probably wanted to be a fireman or an astronaut or a bingo card at five, no. It was it not? No, I'm not really surprised. ~ so let's go do what we always do at this point. Go in back in the way back machine. Tell us about your early life. How did you start? Where did you start? What was school like? All of those things. Let's get going there. So I I grew up in a native Californian. so grew up in more of the rural part of California in the Central Valley, way up north, about three hours north of Sacramento. So not necessarily the California that most people think of who are are very aware of it. and then ~ I went to school at UC Davis, which is ~ you know, public university outside of part of the U University of California system outside of Sacramento. And I was a computer science engineer. ~ was my degree was mostly because I thought computers were the future and I could make money doing it. So it wasn't really, you know, that ~ much of a passion or anything like that. I just liked, you know, computers growing up. ideological decision. It was a you weren't a computer nerd, you were like, There's money in those hills. I should do that. No, of course my my my parents were like, you should be a doctor. And it's like, I don't know, I'm kinda squeamish. I don't like blood. seems kind of gross. It's like computers is kind of cool. I like numbers, you know? That was liquid. yeah, it was more ~ actually I this probably this is the worst advice for any young person like applying to college. I just applied To what I thought was the best major at every university I applied to. It's like, if I go to Davis, I should be a computer science engineer because that's their engineering is one of their best fields and I like computers. And I applied to Rice University and it's like, if I go to Rice University, I'll be an architect, because they're the best architecture for horrible, horrible decision because then you're putting yourself in front of all the best candidates. And Davis was the only one who really kind of accepted me. into that good major. And so that's how I ended up there. But tell your kids aside, am I right in saying your wife is a doctor? Yes, she is, so I made my parents proud that way. Yes, yeah. But I can't do it, I'll find a different way to get it done. Yeah, that's fair enough. Okay, well, that's another story. We'll have to have ~ have to have Mrs. Moss on another another episode, perhaps. Okay. I'm sorry, of course, Dr. Moss. I'm sorry I'd like to apologize. And I'd like to point out by the record that Dr. Moss is one lovely, and secondly, a real doctor, not like one of these, I'm a chiropractic doctor, ~ like an actual MD. Yes. So, okay, so you left so so this is interesting. You were very transactional really about the whole education system. Yeah. so I went to Davis. I was a computer science engineer. And ~ yeah, I had good grades in high school and did pretty well. And but, you know, I got to college and didn't do so well. Discovered, you know, wonderful world of beer and friends and partying and you know, didn't do so well. But also what I realized is that ~ I would go into the computer labs and sit with all the The programmers and stuff like that. And that was their social hour, right? You know, they they'd go in and they'd want to play around and make their own programs and their own games and stuff like that. And they were just in that lab and they were all together and there was this cohort. And I was just like, I I how do I do this as fast as possible and get out of here so I can go hang out with my other friends? Right. And so I just observed these people and said, I cannot compete with these people. Right, because they they're just they had such a passion for it. And I just realized very early that I I I like it, I find it interesting, I understand the concepts and I appreciate it, but I just didn't have the passion for it. And I was like, if I don't have the passion for it, I'm not gonna be able to compete. So I added like business minor while I was there because I always just figured, well, I'll take all this knowledge that I've learned about technology and then try to apply it in more of a a business setting. So Z like an early realization that I had in college. Yeah, that's interesting. You were actually more interested in the people than you were in the technology. Yeah, I was always kind of very observant of kind of what was going on around me and what the kind of the patterns of people were and being ~ you know, I don't know how self aware you are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, but I was fairly, I think, self aware of my strengths and weaknesses. Yeah, yeah. I think most ~ eighteen to twenty three three year olds think they're very self aware. ~ which shows how unself aware they are, perhaps. ~ Okay. So ~ you you I did you graduate? I did. I I I was able to pull that off. so I ended up in a program called a Technical Sales Engineering Program, TSE. And this was ~ and I worked for AMD, advanced microdevices, coming straight out of college. Now, this TSE program was there was other TSE programs. A bunch of semiconductor companies had this program, so like Texas Instruments, Motorola, which turned into Freescale. ~ national instruments and Intel. They all had these rotational programs where essentially they took engineers with bad grades and turned you into a salesperson. that was kind of it wasn't it wasn't ~ obviously how they positioned ~ it, but it was essentially they wanted to find people that had good technical knowledge, understanding of what they were delivering, especially in the semiconductor world, as you were doing an embedded sale. into these these areas. And then what they did is they butt, you know, ones that wanted to be more social, have people skills, be able to interact with the market versus, you know, maybe a traditional stereotype of ~ an introverted engineer. And so you got into these programs and you would rotate through different disciplines of, you know, business marketing, you know, sales and other things like that. And then you would graduate for these programs. So it was kind of a well understood thing in the industry. Unfortunately, it it really doesn't exist. It didn't kind of make it through. ~ some of them got lost in the dot com boom. You know, those are kind of sometimes the first things to be cut. And then I think the last bastions of them got ~ cut in kind of like the Great Recession, like 2007, 2008. But it was an amazing program. And so it was like going to school for an additional year inside an organization where you did all these different Things. I think it's interesting, you know, it let's use this as an aside. ~ it I remember an old CEO of mine once said to me, He said, I pay top dollar for these salespeople. And then they're not very good when they work for us. And I said to him, Isn't it interesting that these f people have really good careers before they join our company? Then they have a terrible time working for us and then they go off and be successful somewhere else. And I said, Have you considered training any of these people? And he went, No, I paid Top dollar, I expect to get the best. I said, but if you don't tell them what you want them to do, how are they meant to know? Yeah. And I feel that business is a lot like that. Engineers get trained. Commercial people, you either work it out or you don't. It's like learning to swim by being thrown in the pool. You know, some of you drown and some of you work it out. It seems a very I like what you went through, I but I I I find it terrible that the world doesn't do it anymore. Yeah, there there's some things here at our organization with a leadership program that I'm trying to be involved with now as a back in to a bigger corporation because I want to pay it for it. It was an amazing, amazing experience. And it was harsh too. Like not everybody made it through the program, right? some people just didn't get a job at the end of the rotation. Some of them were like, Yeah, but sales isn't for you. Right, we're gonna move you into a different role or an operations role or something like that. So there was like these high pressure oral boards that we would go through where we essentially had to pitch to senior level executives. So as like a 23-year-old, you're you're pitching to you know, all these people at high levels and they're harsh because there was actually people that were at the upper levels of the organization that came through this program. So they took a lot of pride in it, right? They're like, We're not We're not rubber stamping anybody. Like you you had to make it. And then it was well known within the in Silicon Valley at that time. Like if you came through a TSE program with one of these premier firms, that was like a that was better than having a Harvard MBA at a certain point in the Silicon Valley. It meant you made it through and you know how to sell, you know how to interact with clients, stuff like that. So it's an important thing that I'd love to see. some of these industries start to bring back in there and I I want to try and actively be a part of that too. Yeah, me too. I I will say, ~ I think perhaps ten years or so earlier than that, maybe earlier than that, still maybe 20 years earlier, Xerox were famous. If you wanted to ~ have a career in sales, go and work for Xerox for two or three years and they trained you. It was like a degree in sales. And then it just fell away. And and all these companies then complained that the people they were hiring, you know, well, they weren't very good. It's like, did you train them? Well, no. What what did you expect? It's it's drives me I I and you say about paying it forward. Sure, paying it forward's part of it, but it's also just good business. Right. At some point you will retire. It most of us I think like the idea that our the companies we work for won't collapse the day that we leave. Although I suspect some of us quite like the idea that the companies we work for will collapse the day we leave, but that's another story. Yeah, definitely a little bit of a tangent, but topical to you know what we're talking about and the zeitgeist out there with AI. So the first so you had like one month of onboarding. The second month that was there, I was handed four phone books, like physical phone books with yellow pages. Plopped on my desk and I you I'm in a bullpen other people. And so our our So there were three other people in there with me, and a few other, there's two bullpens of us trainees. And so I had the phone books from for Iowa and Nebraska, you know, selling processors. So this was back in the days of like white box PC makers, right? So I had to call them up and try to convince them to use AMD processors instead of Intel processors and create leads and all that. So you would sit there for a month. Hold calling people out of physical phone books, dialing for dollars, Mac that. And you know, because you're surrounded by a bunch of other 20-year-olds, of course, they're making fun of everything you say behind your back, right? They're like, that was stupid, Jason. What were you talking about? And of course, like you're out later and they're making fun of you and you know, all that sort of stuff. But it really kind of able to get you like focus and call, endure rejection, stuff like that. That job is completely automated now by AI. All the cold calling, all the outreach, all the initial calls, stuff like that, maybe for the better. But that one month was an amazing, forging learning experience of just how to deal with rejection and how to just modify and just get back up and do it over and over again. And there's something to be said in the grind of repetitive tasks as much as we want to. push it to AI and have it go away. There is still something to be said for that in in learning young people as they come into the professional environment. I I agree. I I think that one of the problems with AI, and we're getting way off topic now, but it's my podcast. We can do anything we like. I think one of the problems today is that the bottom rung or two of the career ladder are being replaced by AI. And for you and I who are at the other reaching towards the other end of that ladder, at least I am. You're somewhat younger than me. One of you. ~ what yeah, you so you graduated what year? Do you mind me asking? two thousand. Right. Okay. So you were yeah, I started young, but you started you were quite a lot younger than me. And I think the problem now is that there is that those rungs have been removed. So how do you get onto the ladder when it's above head height at the bottom? I don't I don't know how we quite fixed that, but I agree with you that in my day they used to do cold calling Wednesdays and they would scotch tape your hand to the receiver of the phone. with one finger out and they'd ask you which hand you write with, I'm left handed. So they would scotch tape your hand to the my right hand to the to the phone because it doubled the number of calls you made in a day. Because there was nowhere else to go. There was sit in front of the phone and it's attached your hand. Going to the restroom was somewhat awkward. but they didn't let didn't let you off. You you you took the phone, you unplugged the phone, you took it to the toilet with you. Yeah. ~ awful but transformative experience. You can't have ~ you can't be a hard-nosed business person unless you've had to do hard things. And you clearly did it. So AMD, yeah. So you went through that process, you clearly succeeded, then what happened? Yeah, so I was at AMD for about eight years and ~ did a bunch of various things there, but mostly ended up in doing kind of big account management and sales. Like so I ~ ended up on like a strategic account team and you know, calling on HP. back in the day before HP bought Compaq. So dating back to how long ago this was was there during during the merger, but that was kind of rare. At the time, because usually you had these more senior people that were on the HP account team. And I actually got onto it as a junior team because the lady who ran it, who I I learned the most I'll ever learn about from sales from from this lady, she was fantastic. Realized that you got all these older folks who are like our age now, who I thought was ancient back then. calling on these big strategic accounts. But all the people that you were dealing with were like these late 20, early 30s MBA graduates who are running like product management and portfolio management. And they just there was like an a like a disconnect in the kind of age gap and working with them. And she's just like, you know what? I need somebody younger on the team that. Can kind of relate to them, you know. It started out by like, you know, ~ take ~ take them to this concert or you're you know, hang out with them and and do other things like that. So it it did kind of start out in just like, are you just the sales entertainment guy? But you know, I wasn't satisfied with being the entertainment, right? So I learned the business and got to hang out with a lot of very senior people. And because it was such a big account to AMD at one point, it ~ HP when I was At the end managing it, it was over 20% of the company's revenue was through that one account. So I interacted with the C level at AMD and at HP at a very young age and had to know the business and had to know my stuff. and so that was through the foresight of this one lady who just realized, hey, there's just not a good relationship or not as good of a relationship that is happening. It's not that it was bad. But there wasn't like a a people connection. Yeah. you're thirty, you don't want to be having dinner with a fifty five year old guy like having dinner with your dad. ~ the the dynamic is different, isn't it? Did I have to ask, did you see did you understand the ramifications of that at the time? Or did it become obvious, as the podcast might already allude to, did it become obvious afterwards? Or did you go, yeah, that seems reasonable? well kid it it wasn't obvious to me. It was something this lady Annie had to fight for, right? Because there was like a pipeline. Like when you came out of sales, you started out with, well, you're gonna talk to you're gonna be in distribution sales first. Then maybe once you graduate to that, then maybe you get like a small little territory or a couple of accounts. And then there was like this pathway that you had to go all the way up until you were on a strategic account team and you had to earn your stripes. So she had to fight for it to get everybody to agree to this, but she was bucking the trend and the norm. I was just the passenger and it was very much like, Hey Jason, I'm going on a limb here. Don't don't F that up. Yeah. enough. So it was it wasn't obvious to anybody else in the organization. It was really an insight. ~ This boss I had had, that really it did make a difference. We started out that account at I think it was my first quarter was like 17 or 18 million dollars a quarter. And the last quarter when I was moved through and managing it, it was 380 million dollars in one quarter. It was like the revenue we're doing through it. Yeah. So I got this opportunity to see it scale from you know, tens of millions of dollars to over a billion dollars in revenue. That's a interesting place to be. Okay. So that brings us to what sort of timescale by the time you finish at AMD? it took about eight years. ~ so I did that for a while, the HP account, then I moved into marketing while I was there at AMD because I really appreciated one of the successes I had with that account was I wasn't grinding for a quarterly number. I would look at things a bit more strategically and like, well, we can set this up and then next year it'll be even better and stuff like that. And there was like pressure from management, you know, yeah, hit hit that number. And I would be like, ~ no, let's let's maintain the relationship. But I found that I wanted to get out of that quarterly grind of sales. And so I went into marketing because marketing was a bit more longer looking in kind of how you would lay out the messaging, where you're going, how you would want to talk and how you would want to speak to that. and it was just a meta much better fit. For my personality than you know that quarterly grind. I did try some side accounts on the side where you would have to do like a territory and a number just you know kind of to sharpen my skills, but that just wasn't wasn't me and what I was good at. I was more good at these bigger, longer term strategic relationships. And so it's always the problem with sales, isn't it? ~ sales is great. You can think as long as thirteen weeks in advance if you're lucky. ~ four times a year. But most of the time it's what am I doing today? ~ I p I've always personally found that boring. You you end up if you've only got such a short time horizon, you can't come up with interesting ideas because there's simply no time to implement them. Marketing gives you gives you more opportunity there. Yeah, yeah. So to answer your question, how I kinda got out of there, I I ended up doing a stint in Munich, ~ setting up marketing operations and still doing my other job of running global consumer marketing for AMD, but lived abroad for a year. When that assignment was over, kinda I was reporting to the CMO at the time, the job that they had for me was a much more finance oriented internal role of like how are we gonna spend our money and how are we gonna, you know, drive the margin and set up all these sort of things. And that just didn't didn't really appeal to me. And, you know, living in the Bay Area, it is required at some point that you work for a startup. So I f decided I would fulfill that requirement and and ~ go do that. So ~ I had a former boss well I didn't work for him very long at AMD bus it it wasn't the right fit for him, but I I really loved him as an individual. He went to a company called e Inc. And people are starting to see e Inc. more now. You're actually starting to see it at some of these shows, ISE and Infocom. but it's the e-paper displays. It was what was in the Amazon Kindle. It was a spin out from MIT Media Lab. And so ~ he went over there and he brought me over to kind of set up their offices in the Bay Area. and to call on Amazon, who was like the largest customer in the bulk of the revenue for that that company. Sony was like second. So it was I was there to provide adult supervision of how do you manage these large strategic accounts? And so I left ~ AMD to go give that a shot and do the startup. The way you speak of it, I'm not I'm going to go out a limb here and say, I'm not certain that ended over there. It ended it it did end well. but it was ~ so when I got there, I think the company was about twenty-three million dollars was like the total revenue of the company, which wasn't too bad. I was like I think I was like employee 110. So it wasn't like early, early stage startup. It had some some business at that that time. But it was a technology that had been around for a while and that was still trying to find its commercial footing. And then, you know, the investors were in there long, right? And so they sold too early, honestly. And then the Kindle became like the huge hitted that it is today, and ebooks are now just like a prevalent thing in our culture. But that wasn't very obvious at the time. Right, because a lot of it wasn't just the technology of the books. It was I spent actually a considerable amount of my time not just working with like Amazon on the other thing, but like how do you talk to the Hearst Corporation about publishing and getting them to put their content into an e ebook format? Right. Building the ecosystem of success around the solutions and and things like that. So having to sell you're having to sell an idea as much as you are a product. Yeah, I mean Amazon was like behind it, right? They were pushing it too. But then we, you know, Amazon had their own agenda. We didn't want it just to be an Amazon solution. We were looking out for the industry, right? We wanted Sony to have ebooks. Remember Barnes and Noble had ~ their ebook too, right? And so we were trying to represent an industry need with that ecosystem that was there. But anyway, it it did end up well. Like we we sold to a Taiwanese ~ display manufacturer sold a bit too early. We kind of renegotiated because as the business started to grow. So the the total amount of enterprise capture for what the technology developed probably wasn't fully recognized in the the cell. And so again like start at 23 million. I think I left my position I was at the the end after we were acquired. I stayed a year for you know to complete the acquisition earnouts and things like that, but I left and we're just my territories of the Americas and Europe was about six hundred and seventy million dollars and a forecast for over a billion dollars again i in a three year span. But I I would treat that as a very successful sorry, when I s y the way you were speaking of it, it was like, this isn't gonna go very well. But actually that's very good. business success. Was it as successful for the people involved who created that enterprise value and what they got returned? Probably not as rewarded as much as it probably could have been, right? So business success. Hundred percent knocked it out of the park. The company that bought it to great company, they've they've been a good steward of the product and continue to innovate in it, they've done good things. Did the people who do all that work up front and kind of make it happen, get as much of the reward as they probably deserved? Probably not. No, that's fair. Okay, yeah, all right, but it could have ended a lot worse and often does. yeah. I I mean I remember speaking ~ to one of the VCs when I was at Life Science, and they were one of the big one of the big Silicon Valley VC firms. And I asked him about how what do they treat as success, and he said, Well, if we invest in 10 companies, we expect half of them to go nowhere at all. They'll die. We know that. ~ forty percent will be okay and we'll get our money back. ~ ten percent they'll hit it out of the park and we'll make more than our money back. And therefore the whole of the rest of the process is worth doing. And you're clearly one of the 10%. Yeah. Well it was it was interesting. They talk in Silicon Valley, right? They talk about this, ~ they use a baseball analogy like with these startups, like, hey, a lot of strikeouts, a lot of outs. But you get a single, you renovate your house, double, you buy a house, or or it's like you buy you buy a new house, triple, you buy a new house in Palo Alto. and then a home run is generational wealth or something like that. island. Yeah. we would have all said ~ the created the economic value we created it should have been home runs and we all got doubles and singles. Right. Of course I'm gonna respond with baseball. That's the game with the men with the hats, right? 'Cause I don't really understand anything about baseball but the international audience out there. That's all right. I they'll work it out. Don't worry about it. All right, so you left there. Yeah, you got a renovation on your house. then what happened? Yeah, so I went to Logitech after that. and I joined Logitech at a at a very interesting time. There was a product that they had worked on called Google TV. I don't know if do you recall Google TV? Yes. Well you were at Logitech, so you know this one. Yeah. But it was a precursor for people who didn't know, is like a precursor to Android TV. But it was like a set-top box that Logitech had made and then a set of peripherals that would go around it. So the the idea of of that product was Google, as they built out an operating system and becoming a home entertainment hub, Logitech would then do like what they did for Windows PCs or Mac OS. It's like, let's make all the peripherals that go around it. Somebody else makes the software, and people are going to make the hardware and we're going to make a bunch of different things. So we had like television cameras, and then ~ check had the harmony remote line of products for universal remote controls, speakers, other things that were all gonna be surrounding it. And then the idea was so the role that I was hired to do was to essentially run kind of like the business development of that. We were selling it to. ~ Comcast or Orange or like these other like cable companies where we would get the hardware in there and be able to like sell an outfit that. So I waited my year and one day from the startup, took a f took a little bit of time off as I had my first child was born around that time. And then started at Logitech and I showed up there to do that job and they said, why don't you just hold on for a minute? We're not going to have you do that job. And this was when? eight? nine? ~ as late as that. Okay, right, right. So what happened is is that the the product was not a commercial success. even before I got there, Logitech took about a hundred million dollar write-off right as I started. And ~ the previous CEO, who I interviewed with in the process to get this job, was then fired 30 days later. W was this the same CEO that had bought life size for four hundred million dollars? Yes. Yeah. ~ it's interesting Logitech just recently for the audience recently had a get together of all the previous CEOs. I don't think he was invited, was he? Yeah. Not surprising. Lovely guy. I mean I didn't know him that well, but yeah. ~ never met a man and I can't remember his name, so probably best we don't speak further of him, but well it was an interesting what an interesting set of developments that was. Yeah. So the the chairman of the board, the previous CEO, Greeno De Luca came back and ran the organization there for the first year and before Brack and Darrell kind of came in in my starting my second year when I was there at Lodge Tech. So I didn't have a job. I had my first kid, I was a little freaked out. It's like, well, this isn't good. You know, but they they seemed to like me at Lodge Stack. They're like, okay, we'll we'll give you something else to do. and so I ended up running global strategic accounts, which really was a euphemism for the OEM team at the time, right? So how do we we make keyboards and mice rebranded and sold to HB and Dell and and those organizations? And so I did that, but then of course it was like That's that's a losing proposition, right? You have a Swiss manufacturer trying to compete with low-cost manufacturers and ODMs in Asia, you know, that had a a very short self-life. And so Guerino tasked myself and three other people. There's four of us in a cohort. I was kind of sales business person, there was a strategic person, there was a finance person, and there was a product person. Like, what can you do with this business? Like, should we keep it? Should we get rid of it? What what what do what do you do with it? And so remember, we worked on this for a few months, came back and actually found the business was quite profitable if you looked at it overall, because it was generating the the volume for for Logitech. Like almost 40% of the volume was doing this because you sell millions and millions of mice to HP or Dell or stuff like that. Or right. so it kept the factory opening and stuff like that. And so when she actually looked at the enterprise value of what the the organization did. It was really healthy for the business. So we serve was like, okay, it's good to keep it, but we have to diversify. We have to do other things. There was a one small little customer that we had, which was Cisco, who is you know, sourcing, we were doing some OEM business with our webcams. And so developed a relationship with Cisco to actually start to build some unified communications products with them that they needed. For their virtual desktop implementation of keyboards and mice and different telephony and stuff in the UC space, and ~ actually successfully kind of helped build out a portfolio that was co-branded with Logitech and Cisco. And so that was kind of a little bit of a change of what we were doing in the organization to try and get away from just being a low-cost keyboard and mouse provider, just try to find these other things. And whatever happened to Cisco, do they did they go anywhere? that's right. That's right. Now I remember. Yeah, one of the biggest players in UC there is. Okay. Interesting. We're we're rushing up for those the audience won't know this. ~ Jason, we're rushing up on the moment where Jason and I met. And I'm I'm excited to see where we go next. So the obvious next question, then what happens? Yeah, that one happened. So as we did that, Logitech had looked at their business and you know the predominant amount of revenue was coming from the consumer market. I think it was about ninety percent consumer, ten percent was this OEM business, even though it was much more of volumes. It was like, we need a if you wanna grow in this industry, we need to have a B2B business. You know, so the the first instant instant ~ instantiation of the Logitech for Business moniker kind of happened around 2014-ish, ~ 2013, 2014. Yeah. And that group got formed and then it was doing okay, but then really Logitech determined like, there's something more specific and unique around unified communications with headsets and webcams and Maybe let's let's go after the unified communications. So the original Logitech for business kind of faded away and they focus on Unified Communications. Me being one of the only people in the organization that even knew a little bit about unified communications because of this relationship with Cisco, and they knew I didn't want to do this OEM strategic accounts job longer term, said, Hey, can you let's let's have you move over and help start up our enterprise sales group. and so That's how I got into this industry that we're in today was through that transition, ~ just because of this relationship Logstech had with Cisco and I knew a little about it. Isn't it interesting? just as an aside, this is a really interesting moment because Logitech had owned LifeSize, which was a B2B Unified Comms video collab player. And they bought them in 2009, and no one noticed because neither Logitech ever kind of admitted they own LifeSize, and LifeSize certainly never wanted to admit they were owned by Logitech for reasons that we might at some point find out in another episode. It was a crazy time. Yeah. And just when you're doing the Let's go and build a B2B business for Logitech, which they didn't involve life size in at all. I was at Life Size Yeah. looking at products like the BCC 950, which, for those of you who can't know what that is, it's the eyeball on a stick. It was a little webcam with a PTZ mechanism built in at the top. And suddenly computers like ~ like an Intel NUC or a Mac Mini could actually start running codecs. On which previously they couldn't. So suddenly you could look at a a a little $500 Intel NUC with a $300 webcam on a stick with a little speakerphone on it, and you go, Why do I need I remember saying to Logitech sorry to life sizes senior leadership team, why do I need to spend ten thousand dollars on dedicated hardware when I could buy a Logitech PTZ camera and a NUC for a thousand? Why do I need that? And they went, because we don't know how to make money selling that. And I decided to leave life size and join Logitech of all places. Yeah. And so you and I ended up at the same spot from completely different angles. How strange. Yeah, it's funny. That product was called the codename of that product, the little eyeball and a stick. There was a little eyeball and stick, we sold it a lot, was called the orbit. And then one of our engineering leaders, named Ali, said we could stick a speakerphone on the bottom, right? And so the codename of it was called the Orbit Ali. That was like the and everybody was just like, Okay. And then we had one ~ product manager, she had the foresight to support Ollie and said, Yeah, I'll take this to market. But it was not like a real strategic, like somebody had this foresight that this is going to be a thing. It was just more one of the engineering people just said, Hey, I can stick a speakerphone on it. And one of the product managers, she went, Yeah, that sounds cool. I'll support it. And then that was probably a product on its own that helped kind of change an industry. Right. And it wasn't through a strategic whiteboarding session with lots of posted sticky notes moved around on stuff like that. It was just an engineer and a product manager getting together and saying, Hey, there's something cool I can do here. And it's really interesting that that you were doing that at Lodgy without understanding what you were doing. And I was on the other side of the fence looking at it from the hardware world, going, That's what the future looks like. Where most of that industry either didn't understand that or maybe perhaps more importantly, maybe they did see it but didn't want to accept it because if they did, it was gonna revolutionise their world. ~ there's an interesting angle there that one of the problems with innovation is sometimes you innovate your existing business model out of existence and you then have a choice. You can either you can either destroy your own business model with a new one or you sit back and wait for somebody else to do it for you. What's the answer? Yeah. It's a it's a tough one. It's really tough in these organizations, right? Because people and it's not just the individual and it's not them being selfish about them protecting their own revenue, but they're also protecting the people, the jobs, the organization is built around this business model, right? And it's hard to take those risky decisions because you care about the your your friends and colleagues that are around you too, because if you make those decisions, you don't know instantly what to do with the people that are already in those roles. Yes. And you've also got the issue of you go, well, I could come along I I can see the future and it may look like this, but I've destroyed everything I presently all the people I work around and live among and the industry that I'm in. And somebody else might so if I ignore it, a lot of companies will play that I'll ignore it and hope it goes away game. I've certainly explored that with a number of guests and it rarely does. But you could also say, but we can carry on for a couple more years because no one else is in a position to do it. You know, Logitech was a good example. The BCC 950, the Orbit R Lee. who else had one of those? Nobody else had one of those, and no one looked likely likely to go and invent one of those either. It wasn't an obvious choice. So, you know, perhaps the industry could have lasted another three or four years with the old model. i it ended up not doing so. But it's an interesting counterfactual, isn't it? yeah, there's there's something that's interesting that was very this interesting systemic advantage that Logitech had with its video technology that I think the AV industry or just the industry didn't quite understand, but also changed the unit economics of the game. Because the Logitech had an OEM business, we were selling keyboards and mice and other things like that. One of the other things, and Logstack continued to sell webcams and it spiked when Skype came out, right? You know, the original one, stuff like that. But webcam sales were were sort of following falling. Logitech actually OEM'd the camera modules that were in the laptops. Flip your laptop open, there's the little camera that's in there in the top. and to be in that OEM business, you had to like really drive down costs, right? And then you had to had to Pick like specific components, what you're trying to do, you're trying to do things that were just good enough, right? Just, hey, I just need a camera in the lid of the laptop. That business went away. But a lot of that technology or mindset made it into the webcams, which made it the webcams actually really profitable. But then the sensors and the things that we were making for the webcams, what also rose during that time was the launch of smartphones. And then you started to put cameras into smartphones. And so the unit economics of the cameras just dropped through the bottom of the floor, right? It just became ridiculously inexpensive. And so a lot of the technology and the sensors and the planning of what was in the Logitech camera technology was derived from the cell phone market. Whereas AV was still using camera technology from broadcast markets. And so then all of a sudden you had this wide disparity of cost. But because the cell phone market was moving so fast, the quality was coming up so quickly. Yes. And also the size of the market opportunity increased by a factor of a hundred or a ten, a hundred, a thousand. I mean, it wasn't it was in the 2010 range that you would look at a at a customer and go, they're gonna buy 10 systems. Woo! You know, within five years, you didn't look up if it wasn't a thousand. so everything about the economics changed. It it that and Skype and then Zoom. changed the the basic economics and the network effects of customers were no longer just ringing each other London to New York, which was the traditional video conferencing market. It suddenly explodes to everyone in every office globally. And that really tra and and Logitech was in a brilliant position to make that happen. I I think it's fascinating. Yeah. And so that that kind of goes into period of time when we met. So as I started in sales and doing stuff in there. And then, you know, through an unfortunate set of circumstances, the the business leader, you know, got ill and I I took over general management of of the group for a while. we found that the A V industry hated us. Absolutely hated us. Right, because we were the cheap keyboard and mouse company that's coming in and ruining everybody's margins. Right. And so there was a considerable effort that we thought of we're like, well, we don't want to be hated, right? We want people to accept us. Right. So there was like a specific outreach that I did to different people in the industry. I tried to show up at A V user groups and you know, that you were involved with. I can't remember if that's the first way we met. but I know at a certain point we I think we met when you were at life size, though, but first time we were like really engaged was maybe through that. It's how I met Joe Fam, who's the Q the president of QSE or CEO of QSE, because he was the chairman of Avixa. I was like, well, he must be an important guy. He's the president of the whole A V organization. I should go be friends with him, right? So like we made a concerted effort to you know, kind of talk about ourselves in the industry and not be this hated, you know, kind of bottom feeder that was just gonna come in and disrupt everybody's margins. We said, no, no, no, we're here to play, we're here to make the industry better, we're here to be involved in it. and so we made this very intentional outreach to try and ingratiate ourselves into into the industry. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then and then meetup. I mean, I think that if if any product changed the market more than Meetup, I'm struggling to remember one that did. Because suddenly clients could walk into a meeting room and have a proper meeting room solution for a tenth the price of the next nearest device. I mean, sure, you had to bring your laptop. to to run the call. But so what? You brought the laptop to the meeting anyway. And I think that that that changed the market. And I I think it's public domain and I'll say anyway, sell well over a million of those devices, where most of the rest of the market, the the traditional videocrat would treat 15 to 20,000 units as as a lot over the lifespan of a product. And suddenly Logitech turned the world on its head with ~ with a $900 product. I mean, I joined Logitech because of Meetup because Scott Wharton, who ended up being both of our bosses, told me about it on the phone. And I walked into my wife's office and said to her, I've got to join Logitech. They've got the most exciting thing in the world about to happen. So I kind of I suppose I did see it coming. Great for me. And there's a million other things I didn't see coming, by the way, but that one I did. Did you see the importance of Meetup? yeah, so we were there, I mean, as heavily involved in the creation of that product and where I was at. So this is an interesting thing, and I I know we're gonna talk about a question of this is one of those typical things of you have to listen to customers, but not take them literally, right? In in what they're asking for. So we had a previous product to it, which kind of helped establish this, which was the conference cam three, the CC 3000E, just rolls off the tongue, right? It was like this PTZ camera at one end and then a round speakerphone at the other end, with like this nest of cables that you had to plug in and and get from one end to the other, right? And so that was kind of like the the big brother to the Orbitali, the BCC 950 product that we talked about. And that actually really started to raise it up, and you know, people are taking us seriously. And then all as we heard from the sales team over and over and over again was I need longer cables. I need longer cables. And we're What do you what do you mean you need longer cables? Like, well, you know, the cables aren't long enough. You can't get a USB from the center of the table to over here. All that sort of stuff. And so I remember going on this sales trip. one of the one of my favorite sales guys who's based in New York who would like load me up with like three to four meetings per day. And you're just like subway and you you see like twelve people in a week, right? And all of them were these CC three thousand E customers or concerning to be customers, but they're like, ~ yeah, it needs longer cables, it needs longer cables. Like This guy was just like, why do need longer cables? Like what like tell me what like what are you trying to solve? Like, well, I've I gotta get it from here to here. And ~ I think one of the guys, I think it was the the leader at one of the big law firms, Gadden Arbs, who was doing it, is just like, look, we're spending more money on this mahogany table in the chairs than we are on this equipment. I can't stick a piece of equipment in this really nice boardroom and have cable showing and everything's like that. And so really the inside insight was that they didn't want longer cables. They wanted a clean install and they wanted it to look nice. Right? And so that was actually really the thought behind Meetup is like, well, can you build an all in one and a simple install in one place where the sound comes from? The the built more for not the old world where there was always a a polycom starfish sitting on the table where everybody was staring at the phone and then you would get like the side view of somebody's ear from the video camera. But how do you just create the aesthetics of the room where everybody should be looking up at the the the screen and make it nice, easy, seamless. And I remember it was it it started with that conversation of constantly hearing this feedback of we need longer cables. But that's not what they needed. You you had to take like a moment to go deeper. Isn't it interesting though how the world works? In hindsight, the whole video bar market, which I would argue meet up, started. It didn't have compute in it, but that's just a detail, really. But that whole bar market, which has become a multi billion dollar market and really dominates the video collab space today. From here, it looks obvious. Well, of course that's what we should have done. But as sure as Dickens didn't look obvious when we were doing it. Yeah. I was at I was at large sizer before that. A Polycom and and any one of us, any one of those companies could have built a video bar. I mean, it would have been bigger and clunkier and all of those things and more certainly a lot more expensive. But no one thought about building one. I think a company called Telelabs had a little device. but again, everyone looked at that stuff and didn't see it. It's very interesting to see how Yeah. you and others. Well yeah, it's it stuff out. yeah, it's interesting. So if you think about a lot of the people who became like the director of UC for the IT department or something like that, most of them had telephony backgrounds, right? And most of the people were there were all worried about and so they were just so oriented around I have to have a phone on the table. I have to have a speaker phone on the table. And that was just like the primary consideration phone on the table. And you couldn't get people's mindset to shift away from having this round thing, or in Polycom's case, a starfish looking thing, on the middle of the table. Well what how do I how do I talk to it? How do I how do I dial? Right? You know, that was just it was just so ingrained in everybody's thinking that that's just what locks people into the current situation. So you did a lot of important things at Logie. You and I were peers for for many years. and there was tons of products that we did together. And there was, you know, Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, two of the most successful products in history. I think only beaten by Meetup, which was perhaps the most successful video collab solution in history. and then at some point, and I can't actually now remember how long ago it was, you left Logitech. Mm-hmm. And went off and did something else entirely. Yeah. When did you leave? And why did you think, I know, I'm gonna go and join Q. Well, you were QSC at the time. Yeah, yeah. So, what attracted you to them? And when when was that transition? I've truly now forgotten. Yeah, yeah. So ~ the transition was January twenty twenty, right before the world got weird. at about Yeah, yeah, I I had maybe like a month of normalcy. I remember going to my first ISC in back this last one in Amsterdam at the beginning of February, where it was a little eerie, and you're like, Do we wear masks? Do we hug people? Do we even shake hands? Do we like? I remember like the the section of the the the show that was like a lot of the Chinese manufacturers was like a ghost town. Like they just didn't show up. So it was like right on that edge. Chinese companies just failed to show up and there was all this talk of this killer disease and everyone was ~ it's just a flu or it's the end of the world. No one really knew which it would be. I guess it would was it was an odd it was an odd time. But that's that's honestly right when I joined. I and the reason I I I left, Joe Fam called me up, who I'd ~ made a relationship with before, just trying to know the A V industry and I really liked Joe and I got a chance to meet the QSE team over the course of time and I got introduced to QCS and I thought it was just super compelling technology and I was like, this is the future, right? This is ~ there's probably a limit to You know, maybe some of things at Logitech or something like that, but I I kind of view things in kind of like three stages of business maturity of there's the architect phase, the contractor phase, and the facilities management phase. Right. And I I kind of prefer to be in the architect and contractor phase. And I kind of felt where Logitech was going was more, hey, we've got a good thing going here. It's operational, we're growing, we're incremental with you know. So there's no animosity or anything like that. It it was great. ~ Scott, our former boss, I don't know if you remember this, he gave me a the little going away party. They gave me ~ chairman advisor emeritus for the business group. I still have like the little thing. so it was great. I I left on such good terms ~ with with everyone at Lodge Tech, but I just like there's something over there with that QSC team and this QSIS thing that's ready to be built. That people don't enough people knew about it. Right. And I think when I got over there, I was like reviewing a bunch of the surveys and brand surveys. And I thought one of them spoke to me really well because they asked a question of all the customers and partners and said, Give me your 30-second elevator pitch on QSIS. And one person's response was, I can't give you a 30-second elevator pitch of QSIS. But you give me thirty minutes, I'll give you a customer for life. And that was Amazing praise yet damning at the same time, right? It was yeah, yeah, yeah. Both. but so I was like, there's opportunity here. Now it did not look like a good decision at the time because then the global pandemic hit. Logitech sold out of every video camera in the past, and then most of QSE's revenue came from cruise ships, theme parks, stadiums, cinemas, convention centers. Name a place you don't want to be during a global pandemic, and that's where the revenue came from. And then I'm and then Logsex just like skyrocketing. And then so my wife's like, Well, that was the dumbest career decision you've ever made. So it was ~ it was a rough few first few months over there, right? It was just like, what did I just do? but you know, QSE did some amazing things during the pandemic. They made decisions in three months that probably would have taken the organization three years to make and really set it up for success and really focused in on well, what are the things that makes that has really big future potential at QSE? And QSIS was essentially was QSIS and our portable pro audio line of of speakers. And it was just I think a masterclass in executive management from the team over there at QSE. on how they handled the pandemic, how they restructured the organization, and how they got focused. And even though maybe the top line of the QSE revenue dipped, and because it was a privately held company, it wasn't publicly stated, the QSIS business never dipped. And the QCys business only grew during that time. But it was just immensely impressive how everybody there just rallied around that. Focus. And it's so I was I was super happy to be there during that time. And I learned so much from just the team and how they managed that through that situation. Yeah, and and and I think something worth noting here ~ for the audience is that during tough times, like a global pandemic is a good example, right? Completely unprecedented. Yeah, you may have a dip in your revenues over a period of time, but so do your competitors. And therefore the decisions you make at that time are really important because all of the timescales are compressed. it it's sort of the analogy I would use is a bit like sailing. Right. If you're racing in a sailboat and it's a steady wind and a calm sea, well everyone can go fast then. That's easy. It shows the difference between the quality of leadership when it's rough and when it's blustery and when the chips are down as to who does well and who doesn't. And without naming names, some of your competitors stumbled very badly during that period of time and and QSD didn't. And it would have taken you a lot, lot longer. To have that transformation in the market that you did have because the time can the timescales were so compressed. I think it would have taken you 10 years to overtake some of your competitors if everything had been calm. So, in many respects, the pandemic worked brilliantly for QC. Yeah, sounds awful to say that the pandemic was a good thing, but it was in in a lot of ways. Yeah. obviously at a personal level, tragic for millions of people and all of those it it almost seems churlish to have to say that, but of course those are things true. But from a business point of view, you came out enormously stronger than you went in to that scenario. Yeah, yeah, you know, la luck has a lot to do with these things, right? and but you know, success is based on, you know, luck and being prepared and then turning that into opportunity. Getting in luck's way. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so so QSIS, you went through it. I think many companies did. I mean at Logitech we just if if it if it c had a webcam capability, we couldn't keep it in stock. It went completely bonkers. ~ little different for you. And obviously QSIS was then transformed by that. You I'm sure they're still in cruise ships and ~ and stadiums and all of those things, but you also then got pretty involved and have now got very involved in the UC space. So do you want to bring us a bit more up to speed with where you are now with this and and what that transformation has looked like? Yeah, so like QSIS got its got its start in those bigger infrastructure solutions and projects and I would say even mission critical solutions where it just has to work and it had to have redundancy. Like, you know, if your Super Bowl halftime show, you know, it's gotta work then. Otherwise You're you're disappointing a global audience, right? If you're bringing your kids, families bringing their kids to Disneyland, something shuts down, you know, you're disappointing a bunch of people of revenue and you're not getting that revenue back, right? You don't have a tolerance for error, right? I I'll tell you we did ~ for one of the recent Super Bowls, we won't name this stadium, but one of the stadiums had one of our competitor solutions in there, found out it wasn't working, contracted us to redo it all ahead of the Super Bowl and everybody at the Super Bowl party I was at was like, Jason, you're so like tense and nervous. Like, and I was just like, I'm like, do you have money on the game? Or like, are you really rooting for this thing? And I was just like, I just need the halftime show to go really well. It's like, I do not want to answer if something goes wrong. But work brilliantly, but that's like the pressure you're under. But anyway, you start from that. And then this is kind of what QSIS does. We always kind of start at the high end and then bring things down. And because ~ everything we're doing was based on x86 Intel processors at the time, we got to take advantage of Moore's Law. So where you started QSIS, it started with you know big Xeon servers, but then we were able to get stuff down to an atom-based processor. And because we're just using commodity hardware, because all the magic of QSIS is in the software and how we do it. So, as long as the compute costs continued to come down, we could then take that software and apply it to anything. And so the unit economics got good enough for QSC to start to be relevant in the corporate market and to get into more and more of these different spaces that are in the corporate market. So we started at what we helped coin the term with Frost and Sullivan of high-impact spaces. That was actually. An interesting thing, which is kind of a ubiquitous term now that people kind of refer to these high impact spaces. But that was ~ in sticking with the theme of the podcast, a not obvious thing. Because I remember when you and I were at Logitech, we would talk about those high-end spaces, and they were the complex spaces, the expensive spaces. The spaces you needed to hire one person to just manage the executive space. They had all these negative connotations to those spaces. And and we Purposely at QSE said, no, no, no, these are really important spaces. They make big impacts. Even though it's like one or two spaces in an organization, they're really impactful, right? Because you're all hands beating is there and the executives need to look good. you're putting it into the spaces that you're bringing your most important clients to. So it was all about making the right impact. And so we really focused on being a trusted provider for those high impact spaces and really saying. Yeah, I know these spaces are annoying and expensive and they take a lot, but if we just focus on the outcomes and the delivery of the impact that we're trying to deliver with these spaces, they're much more relevant. And it became much more relevant after the pandemic because everybody went hybrid or was working from home. And so the only time you went into the office was when you needed to have a big important meeting. And so there was also a reinvestment into these spaces at that same time. But that wasn't an obvious thing at the time because everybody was focused on the volume of how many huddle rooms can I get out? Right. And we kind of went the opposite way. And we said, no, there's these other spaces that are really important. And I think we can play a really important role and deliver a really good outcome. But but you needed both because i if you own if all you have is really important rooms and there's no one to call and there's nothing to interact with, then it doesn't actually help you very much. You need to have the network effect, which means that things like video become ubiquitous, which then means that the high impact spaces are actually really important now, which means that you flourish. So you I would argue that you actually need both the angles. you need to have a reason you need to have a really useful room. But you also need to have a really useful room that's gotta be able to communicate with and be part of a much larger whole. And that requires mass deployment. It's it's it's a very interesting yin and yang, isn't it? They're both they're both required for the thing to be useful. Yeah. So exactly the same thoughts that that we had over here is that as we established ourselves in this category of space, we had more and more people come to us and say, like, hey, we like what QSIS is doing, we like the flexibility, we like the management, the visibility, we want it in the more spaces. And by the way, it wasn't just high impact boardrooms and all hand spaces. We have paging throughout the systems. We're in the cafeterias, we're into the other spaces in the environment. The only place we weren't playing was kind of like the smaller meeting rooms, or maybe you would say some of like the hot desking scenarios. But most people want to be able to have a total view of their workplace. And we're heavily focused in this discussion because this is our background on the workplace. But that same conversation goes to hospitality. You know, if you think of like a large casino, right? You know, what is the system you're running in the sports book versus the restaurants versus the gaming area versus you know the the lobby areas, the entertainment places. You don't want to be managing all these different various A V systems. I remember talking to one of the larger co working outfits and just in a co-working like Business environment, they were running seven different A V systems to be able to satisfy what they needed. They're like, I don't want to run that many systems. I want to be able to know background music, maybe my signage in the location, but then have insight into my collaboration spaces, what's happening in the lobby area, all that sort of stuff. Like, why does it have to be seven things? Right. And so that's what QSIS provides. And That was the early opportunity I saw why I came to QSE is I saw that potential in QSIS. And now we're at the point, you know, six years out from that, where we're, and it was really kind of about a year, a little over a year ago, with our QSIS Designer 10.0 launch, where we really finally developed that full stack capability that really enables that ability to deliver on that promise. Very interesting. Tell me about acuity. Yeah. Talk talk me through that. Acuity, acuity now owns QSC and and QCys and but a bunch of other brands as well. We don't need to go into what all the other brands are. But what are they trying to achieve and what what's their what's their future look like? And and I suppose ultimately what does your what do you perceive as your future within that? Yeah, well, I think it's it's very much the same mindset of what I just talked about with, you know, people just kind of want one system. So if you take yourself out of just the A V IT mindset, and then you start to think about other building systems. There's the lighting system, there's the BMS system, there's access control, there's fire, there's all all sorts of these other bu building systems. And people don't want to manage that, right? And or they want a more seamless way to do it. And real estate is one of the biggest line items in any balance sheet of any corporation. Like how much am I paying in rent or for this facility, and not just the facility itself, but the systems to keep it up to date, your electricity, the people you employ to keep it clean and stuff like that. It is a massive outlay. Yeah. Of the finances. And nobody will come and tell you it works really well today. If you start to get into that space as it's fragmented, does the facilities department talk to the IT department? Do they talk to the A V people over here? Or are they talking to HR? And like, and then it's all like different individual silos and fief dums and stuff like that at organizations, not only in the corporate market, but anywhere you go, right? There are, you know, some progressive organizations who think about it more holistically, but they're few and far between. So it's that same kind of concept where acuity with the lighting systems, the BMS systems, now the A-B systems, you can start to think about. there's the operations of the building, and then there's the experience the building provides. Right? If you really think about it in two ways. And so if you start to own. And control these different systems, you can really focus on how do we make this building operate better? And then how do I deliver a better experience for the people inside the building, whether they're there to work and be productive, or whether you're a retail shop and your indicator performance is revenue per square foot of what I'm selling. Right? Performance can mean different things to different verticals and stuff like that. But that's the basic idea. They saw, hey, we're doing it with lighting and BMS. A V is a really important part to bring that experience to the get to the party. Yeah, and I guess the however long I've been in industry, there's this idea that telecoms became part of IT probably about the turn of the millennium, right? It varied, but it at that point telecoms got folded into IT. A V got folded into a into IT over the last 20 years, perhaps. Some people still say they're separate, but they're not really separate anymore. And now IT is becoming an element within the whole facilities world. And it seems to me that you've got what acuity gives you is a bridge between that A V IT world and the and the facilities world. And facilities, of course, own the entire workflow ultimately. And IT is part of that. So it's logical that that works. Do you see that that's where acuities and where you are going to be going in the next few years? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's it's interesting, there's different trades, right? And different channels of like, you know, here's the lighting channel and they they sell at one point in time. There's the BMS channel that they sell at another point in time, and then the A B channel sells at their point in time, IT goes through there. And so you can't really disrupt the systemic structure of all these businesses that are out there. But if you The moniker we use internally here, connect the unconnected. You get those devices connected up through IP and up into the cloud, and you can start to pull data from those systems and start to get a unified view across all these different building systems. Then you can start to get better insights into what's actually happening. And then once you you have people connected, you can see what's happening. And then once you see what's happening, you can then adjust the operations or adjust the experience to start to improve those those items. Right. And so that's like a linear progression of connect people, allow you to see what's happening and then deliver an experience, whether that's for the operation sides or actual like people experience in there. And you do that through getting people connected through IP and up into the cloud and getting the data sets. And once you do that, who's in charge of that? Always IT. Right? Always IT. So you say like Mark Andreessen says software eats the world. Well, who runs the software? IT runs the software. Right. So it there there's a natural way where you need to get into that. And there's gonna be even more of a importance on it because of the levels of risk and cybersecurity in these systems as you connect things to the network. How do you make sure that's safe and secure? and manageable over the course of time w s especially with the capabilities that AI bring to the table with the ability to hack systems and other things like that. So IT is just IT is gonna be in charge. I mean that's a very strongly held opinion by me. Yeah. add to that, yes and is and facilities owns the workflow and IT ultimately support the workflow. They don't define the workflow, they define they they support it. So it's a ver you're you're in a very acuity and you are clearly in a very interesting position. Yeah, yeah. All roads lead to IT, but IT as a backbone for, you know, the facilities people or the A V people or the business line people that are, you know, making the stores or the experiences or, you know, the venues or stuff like that. but all things will have to converge at some point with IT approving these systems and solutions that go into these spaces. Jason, when before before for the audience, before we started this conversation, I said, Jason, we'll do the history bit in about 45 minutes. ~ because I'm trying to keep our conversations a little shorter than they have been. And this one has been close to two hours. So ~ literally an hour and fifty-one minutes of recording so far. I'm gonna edit this down a little bit. Mr. Audience. So it'll actually be less than that if you're still listening to us. But I hope you are, because this has been a fascinating conversation. But we have to draw it to a close. yeah. So Jason, are there any other final thoughts that you want to give us before I let you get on with your life and let our audience get on with their lives as well? Yeah. I think this is ~ as we've gone through my back history. There's been a pattern when I was at AMD. I saw a changing of the industry, the structural industry, where AMD was actually introduced the sub-1,000 PC and helped make PCs more accessible to people. because we were undercutting where Intel was at the time. I then saw the publishing industry change at the start of with this e-ink e-paper thing, which Now we just take for granted that the industry has changed. You and I were around in the same time where we saw this A V collaboration UC industry change from what it was of these big expensive systems or high-end things to ubiquitously deployed across there and converged of A V telephony all into one. And so I've I've seen those three patterns. The same pattern is going to happen again with these building systems. I firmly believe that that is the next big collapse of industries, that they can no longer be separated. When you talk about your physical space and we get into conversations around physical AI and how these things are happening, people are going to expect that you're going to be able to see across all these different systems and be able to make incremental improvements. And that is the next big disruption. I do think that disruption will be slower. Than those other disruptions we talked about, just because of the nature of these physical systems that are in buildings and the sheer amount of capital to actually replace them, you know. But there's also so much more money and investment in there. And I think kind of at the tail end of my career here, that is the next big industry transformation I'm really excited to be a part of and hopefully be a good catalyst for having us all get out on the other end in a better. Better spot than we are today. Jason, I couldn't agree with you more. I think it's a fascinating moment in our in our lives and in in our industry. And I wanted to thank you very much for the last, however long this interview's gonna be once it's published. thank you. A year from now, let's let's reconvene and we will do this again and we will look at how the last year went, because I think you're in a really really interesting spot. So everyone, thanks for watching the show. I really appreciate you getting this far, assuming that you have. Yeah. and with that, Jason Moss, thank you for being my guest on Before It Was Obvious. We'll see you all next week.