The Playbook with Evan Jones

Evan, it's great to have you.

Yeah, thanks, Pranay.

I want to start by talking about the person who introduced us, Uttej. For the longest time, I didn't even realize he used to work for you at Jones IT. What was he like?

Uttej was, when he started here, he was early in his career. And we immediately noticed he was a very promising young engineer. And one of the things that really stood out, I think, about him was just his professionalism. So at Jones IT, we work at our client sites often. So when we send people out, they're representing us as a company. And I was always very confident in him to be able to go out, talk to customers.

Right.

And he showed a real proficiency at working at our customers that have compliance and security requirements. So he was one of our favorite engineers and really had a good time here.

Were you sad to see him leave?

I was sad to see him leave. I, in fact, tried to talk him out of it. I was unsuccessful. But thankfully, he is now one of our member of our esteemed alumni and we still stay in touch.

Right.

You know, he introduced us and at least one or two of our current employees were referred by him.

Yeah. Nice. And he's not the only one, clearly. So you have had a history of people who started their careers with you at Jones IT and then they eventually go on to lead IT at many of the companies that, you know, we know of here in the city elsewhere.

Right.

Is that was that by design or did you just see it happen?

It know it really was by design. We wanted to be a launching point for people's careers and we want them to succeed. And we call it kind of graduating right here where they move on to be an IT manager at another company. And we I found that the IT community is really small. And so it's important to keep in touch with your network.

And we have really good relationships with our former employees. They come visit the office. Last week we had the former IT director at Figma, who was a former IT manager here, come in and give a presentation. And we had a lot of alumni come join. And afterwards we even had a few drinks together and had a lot of fun. So we stay in touch with everybody.

Nice. And Anfernee actually, one of who's one of your employees, he mentioned to me that you have a policy of betting on internal people and you rarely or almost never hire people from outside. Why is that?

So that too is part of our strategy. We want everybody who starts at Jones IT started as a consultant, myself included. And we generally want people to move up from within the organization. We find that when you work in IT at other companies, there often isn't a growth path.

Right.

You can be help desk and then IT manager. And then there isn't really anything after that.

Right.

And so what we wanted to improve retention here, improve the employee experience is for people to come in as a consultant, start their career here.

Right.

And we promote from within. They learn our ways. And then really what we want is for their career to advance, whether that's here.

Right.

Or at our clients or at other companies. And we find that really helps with retention, with career growth and keeps people engaged. And that's I think that's a great culture. And I personally will feel a lot of sadness if people leave us.

That's a great point. I think promoting internal talent, of course, it goes a long way in establishing yourself as a brand as well.

Right.

I actually want to talk about those flags. So, like, they look really cool, but what are they about?

Yeah. So we started doing this in 2018. So something we value here is hard work. My mom always said the best compliment to give somebody is that they're a hard worker.

And so we want to promote that. And I was a basketball coach in a previous lifetime and just love being in school gyms. And every time you go to a school gym, you'll see in the rafters they've got flags and championships and MVPs and things like that. So we wanted to bring some of that culture into the office here. So every year, if you hit a certain threshold, hit goals, you get your name immortalized in the rafters here at Jones IT.

That's really cool.

Everybody can see it. You get a lot of pride out of it.

And so like the people who are up there on the walls, right? What if you were to identify, like, what are the top things or what problems were they fixing while they were doing that? What are the top things that come to your mind? Like, where do you spend the most hours?

So we provide a full suite of IT services. And we want to be seen as an IT department like you might find at a large enterprise and make that available to smaller companies, to startups that maybe wouldn't otherwise be able to hire a full entire IT team.

Right.

So, you know, bulk of things we do are common things we do is help us support onboarding and offboarding. But really, our niche is working with compliance. So companies that have compliance requirements. And that's where we spend the bulk of our time working on those types of projects.

I want to double click on, let's say, let's start with onboarding, for example, right? Can you just, like for a typical client, let's say it's a hundred people company or let's say, what is the onboarding process look like from your perspective today? Like maybe just walk me through step by step, how that works?

So if they are hiring a new employee.

Right. Yeah.

So what we want to make it easier for customers, because there is a ton of work that needs to be done and you need to coordinate different departments. So we want our customers to be able to focus on the hard part of finding the talent. And then once they're in the door, everything is set up for them so that on day one, they're ready to work.

Correct.

And for each company, it's a little bit different, but many of them have similar requirements. So we need to make sure that based on their role, they have access to all the systems, SaaS accounts. They have a working laptop. They have all the credentials and access that they need on day one. But also something that a lot of companies need is an introduction of how to use IT at the new company.

All right.

So we want to make that first day experience for a new employee special. We want them to feel like the company was ready for them.

Right.

That they're prepared.

Yeah.

That they're not flying by the seat of their pants.

Yeah.

So that really we can get them focused and get them working on their role as soon as possible.

I remember, I think I used to work for a bank back in the day. So my first day of the job, I show up at the office and I have nothing to do like because my emails haven't been provisioned. My access hasn't been granted. I don't even know who my boss is.

Yeah.

Because he's not to be seen because I'm stuck in a room with trainings and all going on. So I think that's a great way to put it. I think the first day experience is a game changer, especially for a startup where I think people experience matters the most.

That's interesting.

And so what we do, how does the like we talk about joining, for example, what does the day to day look like? Like do you have them with access tickets or how does that work with you? Like, especially with, let's say you deployed on site, say with one of the customers. How do you guys plug yourself into the entire access workflow that goes on?

Well, we really, we take a different approach than traditional IT.

Okay.

Where oftentimes the experience from an employee is you're working at a ticket.

Right.

And it can be hard to follow. It can be bounced around to different supports and approvals. And what we want is to just have human to human conversation.

Right.

Supporting people.

Right.

Oftentimes we find that in Slack. A lot of customers are using Slack or teams. And that's where people go first to ask questions, to find out about, you know, the organization. And so that's where we are. And we want those employees to just be able to send a message. Hey, I need access to a system.

To send a message to you directly.

Yes.

The person who's on the team basically.

Yes.

Okay.

And then we answer that question right there. They're never pulled into a ticket.

Right.

They feel, you know, totally formal and we're able to just help them right away.

Right.

Human to human. And then in the background, we log all that in the ticket. So it's all auditable. You can refer back. You can see the logs. But to the end user, they're just asking a coworker for support. And we're there for them.

Right. And so how do the approvals happen here? So do you know who to reach out to for approvals? Or is that all? Like, how is that done today? Like, for example, let's say I'm a Jones IT rep, helping a end user with some access ticket that they requested. How would I know who to go to and who do you request access from and all of that?

Well, we want to make it so they don't have to keep track of all of that.

Right.

Because it should be automated.

Yes.

So you can ask the question in any question in one central area, you know, to go to Slack or to the shared IT channel for any question you might have. And you can ask it in the back end. We can triage it and make sure it gets to the right person and approvals.

Right.

But the end user doesn't have to think and remember where to go for what. Every organization is different.

Different family, of course.

And it's impossible for us to come in and say, you have to do it this way.

Right.

Because they may have been doing it a separate way. They may have an IT department internally that we're augmenting.

Right.

So everyone is different. So it's really important to have good documentation.

Right.

And one of the strategies we take on this is we take an iterative approach. So we work with the customer. We say, hey, what is your process now? We document that.

Yeah.

We create a shared document that we share with the customers. So there's full visibility. Maybe that's a notion or your system of choice.

Right. Right.

And then every time we execute on that process, we do a retrospective afterwards. We say, okay, what went well? Let's make sure we prioritize those items.

Right.

And what didn't go well? What was missed? And then we go in and we update the documentation so that next time we never make the same mistake twice and we make it more efficient as we go.

So just to follow up on that, how much of the onboarding you think today? Let's say just looking at your people who do onboarding for your clients, how much of that is fully automated or what part of it is automated and what part of it is not?

You know, if you ask IT managers everywhere, they're going to say, oh, it's fully zero touch, fully automated.

Yeah.

And that just isn't the case. I find that's more the holy grail. That's something where we're always striving to get there. But I was just having a conversation with one of our IT managers earlier and the pace at which these companies are moving, you could have it perfect today. And then by tomorrow morning, they're using new tools. There's new systems.

APIs have changed. Policies have changed. Compliance requirements have changed. So it is always evolving, always moving. You want to try to automate as much as possible, but there still are going to there's always going to be gaps. There's going to be steps that can't quite be automated, maybe legacy or niche or internally developed systems that don't necessarily have a way to automate it out of the box.

How much time do you think goes away in just provisioning those tickets today? Like I'm talking about the manual one, especially the automated one, I'm guessing it's probably done in a few minutes, but the ones that are not automated today. How much time does you think your people are spending on a daily basis just servicing some of those tickets?

Yeah. So we can take anywhere from 15, 20 minutes to onboard a new user to some cases, four hours.

Wow.

And people are often surprised at how long it does take.

Right.

And they think it should be automatic and that it is zero touch. And they're surprised at how many steps, once you really document them, break them all down, you do all the edge cases of how long it actually takes. So we do see a lot of companies come in when they first start and it's up closer to that four hours. And then part of our job is to help reduce it.

Make sense. I know the hardest part of this entire thing would be offboarding, of course.

Yeah.

And I remember you mentioned it to me that offboarding is probably one of the most critical things that you guys help your customers with. Walk me through that. Like how does, how complicated is that or how sensitive is that thing? Because it might actually be a pretty serious event in future, right?

Yeah. I mean, when I first started my career in IT 25 years ago, offboarding was an afterthought. You don't care enough. And it was all front loaded. You want to get the onboarding down.

That's what's prioritized. That's what's valued. And then offboarding, it's like, oh, okay. That person's leaving. That person's leaving anyway. That person's gone.

Yeah.

You know, we'll get to that later. And, you know, there would be a stack of laptops on the IT person's desk that…

Waiting to be cleaned up.

Yes. And it was never a priority. And oftentimes things just lingered.

Yeah.

And the biggest concern then was, oh, no, you know, maybe we're paying for SaaS applications for that person.

Yeah.

But it wasn't enough to move the needle to actually go in, take the time…

We have damage to code.

…and remove them from every system and document that process. What's changed in the last few years is the… really the surge in compliance requirements.

Right.

And so now it's the offboarding is what keeps me up at night.

Yes.

Is what, you know, causes me to lack sleep because if we miss one of these, a user could retain access to their company Slack and see messages after they're gone.

Right.

And they can, you know, even if they're not still looking at data or they don't have access, if those accounts are still alive, they're going to not pass their audit.

Right. Which causes real business implications if they do.

Correct. So offboarding is now probably the most important thing that we have to get right. And, you know, our customers are starting to realize that of how important that step is.

Do you have any war stories from this? Like, have you any bad memories or horror stories from offboarding?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, unfortunately in our industry, rifts are common.

Okay.

So we'll see even with the most successful startups that are growing like crazy, all of a sudden, you know, things change. All of a sudden they need to restructure and they need to offboard 20, 30 people at once. And it can be really tricky. I can think of a few, you know, we were working with one customer that was in a heavily regulated environment and they had a user that was offboarded.

And that user was completely unable to access systems, but there were still some login tokens that were enabled on their account. Even though that they couldn't log in, perhaps they had a device that had to log in and it was still active. And thankfully, you know, nothing happened with that, but it caused a real big red flag on their audit. And, you know, that's something that just can't happen these days. It has to be perfect.

And there are also some edge cases where the employee might still be able to log into a certain system if the account still exists with their email and password.

Right. Yeah.

You may not have enabled a single sign on. You might not have enabled it across the app, across all your apps. So you might still have an employee still using his email ID password to just log into one of those apps and still continue to access. I think the long tail is where probably the risk arises where you need to really be sure that you need to clean up the employees across not just the head of the entire thing, but also the tail.

Mostly right. Yeah, exactly.

Now I know this and you probably know this much better than I do. Okta is probably in all of your clients almost right?

Yeah.

Except maybe a few which are like very small, maybe. Like help me understand, like, what is it that they are not doing that has to be done this way? Like the manual way of, you know, onboarding, offboarding, tickets. Like what is it that lacks in what Okta offers today that makes companies go through this?

Yeah, I think it's Okta is great for all the applications that have full integrations. Now, if you've got the SCIM provisioning, you can set it up to lock those out and we utilize that fully.

Right.

But where it lacks are, again, those kind of niche systems that maybe aren't as well documented, that don't have the full integration.

Right.

And we see it too where a lot of times customers on a tighter budget don't, they've got Okta, they've invested in that, they've got their core products, but they don't necessarily want to go get the enterprise subscription of all the apps.

Right.

And so those are still very manual. You have to go make sure that we hit each one of those. And, you know, they're currently, until we discovered Iden, there aren't that many ways other than just manually doing it, going through a checklist and making sure each one of those is offboarded. The documentation on that, oftentimes companies will need to show evidence that it was offboarded within a certain timeline. So that extra time for each one of those that you're doing.

Right.

So there are still gaps, even when you do have Okta.

And no, especially I think the reason why I bring this up is, you know, for a startup who is growing really fast and, you know, on a budget, there is money and all of those things.

Right.

I think every hour counts a lot. Like if you look at just the hour, not just for the IT person, but also the employees productivity and stuff. So I think it all just adds up, like even though it starts from the onboarding, offboarding access ticket, probably sort of bubbles up all the way to productivity and the entire dollar equation for the entire company.

Right.

What do you say about the whole manual way of doing this is because of the upgrade math, right? Like nobody wants to like pay 10 times the money or even 50 times the money for, let's say, just the SCIM provisioning or the automatic provision and just managing the users. Why do you think that is the case? Is that a more vendor problem? Is that a more budget problem? Is that a more process problem? Like how, like what do you think is the real problem there? Are people not just willing to upgrade or what, what's the real concern there?

Yeah. Well, there are a number of factors. So some of the applications, you know, to get those enterprise features, you might be paying 10x what you were paying before. And so what happens, what we see a lot are customers all of a sudden, whether it's a, one of their big customers or an investor says, we need you to get SOC 2 compliance.

Right.

And in order to do that, Okta is part of the equation. So we roll that out that we need to get a GRC platform. So there's all these really large expenses that come in right there.

Just a bit.

And you factor in a lot of them, but what customers often overlook, businesses overlook are the, now I need to go through my entire tech stack and upgrade the license on every single one.

Right.

And it just becomes too much. You know, the sky is the limit on how much you can spend on these things.

Yeah.

And so it's, they need to make strategic decisions of, Ok, we're going to do it on our Slack, our Google workspace or, you know, the big ticket items. But some of the smaller ones, it just, they, it's not worth it to do it. Or maybe those, some of those smaller ones don't even offer the, yeah, don't offer the integration.

I mean, I think I want to talk about the Bonboard journey that you've had. So you saw the same, some sort of similar problems or gaps in device management, right? So how was that like you found, Ok, there are some problems that you have been seeing over the years with multiple clients that you have served. And how did the decision go from, Hey, I have a process around this, or we have a process around this, how to, how to deal with the devices and tracking them and all of that. To you, deciding to build something for it.

Yeah.

When did that switch happen and like walk us through that.

Yeah. Yeah. So really the idea of it came around COVID where we went from everybody was all of our clients, the businesses we support were in the office.

Right.

They're usually they had an IT closet in the office where all their laptops and everything stood in, and they did very little shipping and sending things around. All of a sudden the customers went all over the world.

Yeah.

And they needed, and maybe they, a lot of businesses started fully remote. So there was no longer an IT closet, a place for these things. And we found that a lot of IT managers were spending more of their time going to FedEx and shipping out laptops. And what happened was now we had this sprawl of these devices everywhere.

And back to the off boarding conundrum of, we need to document that these things are, have been wiped and cleared. And a lot of businesses require a certificate of secure e-waste. And so we needed to find a solution and we didn't see anything in the market that really did what we wanted. So we built Bonboard to deliver that service. And so what the idea of it is to manage the entire life cycle of an IT asset.

Right.

And get those assets into the hands of your employees wherever they are in the world.

Right.

And so Bonboard is able to, from procurement, so you get the invoice for the device. It's all in one platform. And you can know what shelf it's on or if it's been sent to a user, where it is in transit at any given point in time. So that we can satisfy, not only, you know, making sure people have their laptops, but satisfy the compliance requirements that go along with running these companies.

Interesting. And have you sort of like, are you actively maintaining it, building it, or is that more like it's already built and now it's just serving clients all over?

No, we're actively working on it.

Okay.

So it's something where we're constantly improving. It's a service that we offer for free for our customers.

Your customers, yeah.

And they are able to log in and see the status of all their assets. Their finance controller can go in and see, you know, which ones they can take off the books and depreciate and all that. And we are constantly adding new integrations. So we want to be able to integrate with their HRIS platform.

Right.

So that once they hire a person, that laptop is just ordered and shows up at the employee's place of work. And so it is constantly under development. And we have a lot of input from our customers on, Hey, we'd really like to see this feature or integration. So we have a team that focuses on that solely. That's their entire job function is to make sure that our Bonboard system is up and running.

That's pretty smart. I think because you guys are so close to the real problems, I think it's really intelligent to just, you know, productize some of those things just for even your own business. Even if you don't want to like commercially sell it as a separate offering, I think it just makes so much sense to just build something like this. A lot of what you said around devices, especially around, you know, you need to be, you need to know who has what device at any point of time. And you want to track it and all of those things around that, go on that device and all that. I can see the same thing true for what we do.

Yeah.

So identity governance, right? Who has what level of access to what and probably why?

Yeah.

Why does the person even need that access? Right? I think there's a huge, I think parallels between the two, like device and identity as well.

Definitely.

Am I overthinking or is that how you think as well?

No, it's either bits or atoms. It's the same thing you need to track.

Makes sense.

And know who has access and where these assets that maybe you've purchased are, and that could be a subscription or it could be a iPad.

Right. Makes sense. So you adopted Iden for your internal governance as well at Jones IT, right? What was that decision about? Like how did you arrive at that decision?

All of a sudden our system engineering team was fielding tons of similar requests of access requests. Uh, and also the onboarding and offboarding automation.

Right.

And we found some tools that did one, some that did the other. Uh, and Iden what really stood out to us was kind of the combination of both. Um, and the power of that. What we liked is, you know, a lot of, uh, platforms will advertise their integrations and it's things that have already built. What we liked about Iden was whatever it is, we can have it ready for you in 48 hours. Um, that was a big selling point to us because we don't see the same cookie cutter setup at every company. Um, so it is able to meet the requirements of access requests, which are these days upwards of 80% of IT tickets.

Right.

Uh, and be able to help the gaps that we talked about where Okta doesn't get everything for us.

Right.

Um, and when we found Iden and saw that you could do both, uh, and do it securely, that was something that we said, okay, we need to not only recommend this to our customers, but we like to pick and choose the best of the tools that we see and use them internally. And, um, you know, drink the Kool-Aid that we're selling our customers. We want to make sure that the tools that we use, if they work for us, they're going to work for our customers.

I think when, uh, we spoke for the first time, I remember that you first told me that, Hey, before I can even consider it for my clients, I have to try it for my own company. Personally, when I heard you say that I knew Jones IT was in a serious business of, you know, delivering like really reliable solutions to your customers because, but your response was, Hey, I'm going to first start with you. And if my engineers like it only then I'm going to push it to our customers. I think that's again, a symbol of trust that you have built over the years. In our first conversation, you mentioned that there was an application that you personally manage.

Yeah.

Building visitors or some employees.

Yeah.

Right. Have you rented that today or no, not yet.

Uh, have I, have we automated that yet?

Yeah.

Uh, yeah. Well, we're working with the Iden team on it.

Okay.

So yeah.

Yeah.

So every time we hire, uh, onboarded a new employee or off boarded, I had to manually go in and use the app that was only available on my phone, uh, to allow them to have, um, access control to the doors and the alarm. Um, and it became a big bottleneck. Um, because you might not be, I might not be available. You know, uh, the app was also kind of finicky and crashed a lot.

And you don't want the employee to be waiting outside the door.

Exactly. We don't want them waiting. And on the app board, we don't want them to be able to get back in.

Of course.

Uh, so that was one that I just never thought we would be able to automate. And the only solution was, okay, go and buy a way more expensive, something that was 10, 20 X, what we were paying for it for the current system that worked.

Right.

We could go out and buy another application and spend more money than we wanted to. Um, so that's what really piqued my interest was like, wait, you guys can really integrate with anything.

You asked me that question.

Yeah.

Like there is this app that I use on my phone. Will you be able to automate that?

I mean, I think, you know, a lot of companies will like the, if you've got really old, you know, some of our biotech companies have like these microscopes that have,

Oh yeah. Lab systems and all of that.

Uh, systems that were, you know, coded in the sixties. And, uh, and so I think that's a big use case, but for us, it was just this one nuisance thing. Um, and then since we partnered with you, we were able to uncover a few things that were just nuisances that were, you know, we'd like to fix, but we just, we never really had the motivation to pay it or invest a lot of time or money into it. For example, Bonboard, you know, there's no tools that integrate with Bonboard because it's a small, you know, something that we've developed at a house. Um, and we did have to go and change some of the way we handle logins to make sure that it could work with Iden, uh, and your backend. Um, you know, so there is some work that goes into it. Not everything's perfect, but it is all doable and, you know, much easier than trying to develop something ourselves or buy a third party.

Correct.

And then we would have to probably have different third party platforms for each system. And so Iden was able to do it, you know, all for us.

Very nice. So of course, if you have to talk about AI, have you seen off late clients asking you for, Hey, I want to manage my agents that employees are creating and using better. I want to create like a governance program around them. I want to better control as to what my employees are able to just spin up and feed their data in and just start using it. Have you seen some of those things coming to you off late or?

That's the probably number one topic that's coming up, uh, across businesses. And you know, the problem is there's a lag between you've got these compliance requirements, but you've got these new tools that are doing incredible things and people want to and need to take advantage of them. Otherwise they're going to get left behind.

Right.

And, uh, so what's really tricky is the genie is already out of the bottle and people, employees are using this.

Correct.

Whether the business has put together a policy or not.

Inrespective of.

And so we need to make sure that, um, that both parties are in line, right? The executive team who has to focus on risk and compliance is not, you know, the bottleneck for people trying to use these tools.

Right.

And if you say, Hey, you can't use them, people are going to use them anyway.

Yeah.

So what we really need to do is find a way to manage these tools, um, figure out which tools are, people are signing up for, um, you know, kind of the shadow IT. Everybody's signing up for your Claude, your OpenAI and connecting it to everything. Um, so, you know, you can either pretend like, and say, we have this policy that says you can't do it. But, and so nobody is, but in the background people are, um, so there is, uh, you know, a big opportunity, I think for a company like Iden to be able to find out what these employees are using.

Right.

And figure out a plan so that you can at least present it to executive leadership of, Hey, people are using these tools. You know, we need to make sure that it's secured, that there are guardrails and that it's audited and things like that.

Right. I want to go to compliance. Now we have seen SOC 2, when you started off, was there still a SOC 2 thing or is that something that came off in the last few years?

We've seen a huge surge in the last five years.

Five years. Okay.

I'd say before that we had one or two clients bring it up.

Right.

Um, and it was something that the MSP industry was not accustomed to. And I think still hasn't really become accustomed to. There's a lot of requirements where, you know, the company that we're supporting has a SOC 2 compliant requirement. We don't need to have it to support that company.

Yeah.

But again, back to the old point, we want to make sure that we're using the same systems, following the same protocols so that when we go out to customers and advise on their environments, we're familiar with them.

Yeah.

We know there's no supply chain issues coming out of them.

Exactly. Makes sense. And so of course, I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but SOC 2 of course has two approaches to it. One is you do it holistically to improve your own posture and security and all of those things. And the other one is of course, just get that PDF and send it to your procurement teams and you know, just get that done with it. Uh, what's your POV on this whole thing? Like, have you, do you see companies doing one more than the other or how, what's your entire POV on the whole compliance point right now?

Yeah. So what we often see is companies want initially to take shortcuts or have been, or have seen all the billboards. If you drive around the Bay Area SOC 2 in two weeks.

Yeah.

And so they have this unrealized, unrealistic expectation that they can just get it done, get it done, spend some money and get that checkbox checked. Um, but once you really dig under the hood and go for it, you realize that there is a lot of work to be done.

Right.

Um, so what we find is that, you know, if you're really going to sprint, it's going to be at least a six month period. To do it right. Get SOC 2, and the companies that take shortcuts, you know, are not only watering down the value of this compliance for everybody else. But they're creating risk for themselves.

They're creating risk for themselves.

And there's been some high profile, uh, issues in the news lately of companies that have done that. And they're scrambling now.

Yeah.

Um, and they're losing deals or losing opportunities because they took a shortcut.

Yeah.

And, uh, ultimately, you know, I think the reason for these compliance frameworks is not really security, but it's to be able to prove that you have security and good processes in place to, uh, potential customers or investors.

Correct.

Um, and so, you know, a shortcut just is not going to get you there.

Okay. Makes sense. Evan, like, um, now that you have seen like, thousand or thousand companies in your career now, like you have seen somebody best, ugly, good, bad, all the kinds.

Right.

What sets a great company with a great governance or great, uh, security posture and everything.

Right.

What sets them apart from everyone else that you have seen? What is it arc for them? And what would you probably like advice a company like us? For example, we are like 20 people now. Uh, but what is it that we should do right now that are 200 or some company doesn't probably feel bad about?

Yeah. Well, I think so every company, every startup has to be scrappy in the beginning.

Right.

And so I understand, you know, it makes sense for your co-founder CTO to be managing your IT until you're at 10, 20, 30 people.

Right.

Um, and I encourage them to do that. And all of the, we've had the, um, the fortune, good fortune to have worked with several Decacorn companies, um, who have gotten it right. And they all started the same way.

Right.

They were scrappy. They were, you know, everybody there was wearing a lot of hats. And, um, I think that is the way to do it initially. But one thing that I've noticed the companies that separate themselves, you know, I learned this, um, in college at a computer science professor who liked to say that the hardware, the software, the tools, those are all free, you know, yes, it's a $2,000 laptop, but you've got a hundred thousand dollar a year employee using that laptop for three years.

So if you take the cost of the person using the device or the tool versus the cost of the tool and the, and the hardware, it's, you know, less than 1%. It's free. And so I think the customers that understand that realize that, hey, we need to get the right stuff, get the right tools instead of trying to save a hundred dollars here or even a thousand dollars on a, on a network, you know, we want to get the right things that don't get in people's way.

Right.

Because these companies are moving so fast. You see, you see companies go, uh, we've had companies, um, customers hire a hundred people in a month, um, and start doing that month over month. And you can't, anything that slows that down is a disaster, right?

Yeah.

If you have the, if you are lucky enough and fortunate enough to be on that rocket ship, um, you don't want IT slowing you down.

Of course.

Anyway. Um, so we do find that those companies are the ones that, you know, get the right stuff, understand that it's the people that are adding the real value and the tooling is a fraction, a small fraction of the total investment.

Right. Do you see this psychology getting built from like day one or is that something that it gets built over time when you get the right people, for example, the first IT hire you make or the first security hire you make, does that psychology get framed over time?

Or is that something you see that people should probably, for example, like our case, like you did, like I actually described it. Should it be something that my CTO has in his mind today and he instills in the company along the journey or is that something that you can also fix by bringing people on board at a later point in time and just expecting to do it.

I think it is an important trait. So we see it frequently where a CTO doesn't want to give up controls of control.

Yeah.

And, uh, or doesn't want to give up the reins. And you know, I understand it. There's a, there's a feeling of importance if you're really busy. Um, but the problem is if you want to achieve the goals of a lot of the startups out here and they have lofty goals is you cannot get in the way.

Yeah.

That's your main role is if you're the bottleneck for anything, you're just getting in the way of explosive growth. Um, and so it's important to give up those reins, trust other people, trust vendors. Yes, they will make some mistakes, you know, and in the early going, but they're going to learn and they're going to eventually, you know, you have to put your ego aside. They might be better at managing that system than you are.

Of course. Makes sense. One final question for those who are, let's say starting out in it, for example, right? What would you have the next page, for example, learn here that he can't go anywhere else?

Uh, well, this is a really unique environment here. Um, so we have, uh, an incredible client list, um, of different companies, diverse companies, um, anywhere from, you know, your high profile startup that you've got an app you use on their phone every day to, uh, plumbers and construction companies.

And so you see so many environments. So, you know, one advantage of coming and learning here is the exposure. Um, you're going to see a hundred plus different environments, different tool sets, different things.

Um, and it's going to allow you to see, you know, what you're interested in pursuing. Because, you know, in it, it used to be, you have one person and they kind of know everything. Now that's impossible. You know, there's so many different branches that have come off. And, um, so it's important to find out which branch you're really interested in.

Yeah.

Um, and that's something that you're going to get here. Another thing too, that I think is, uh, unique to the experience here is if you go work in an IT department in house at a company, you're number one, you're only going to see that.

One particular scenario.

Yeah, exactly. And, um, but also it's hard to move up. Um, so we often see people will bounce from IT role to IT role at different companies.

Right.

Um, once things kind of get stale and, um, you know, here you're going to see everything and figure out what you like. Uh, and everyone on your team here is an IT engineer.

Of course.

Versus you're at a company and you might be, yeah, you might be pushed off in some corner of the company and you're, that's happening today.

Oh yeah.

And you're looked at as a cost center.

Right.

Um, you're not developing the product that's making that company take off.

Right.

Versus when you work at a company that here, you are part of the product that's helping our company grow.

Of course.

Um, and you, every one of your peers is another IT engineer that might have some experience that you can learn from.

Evan, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you so much for your time. It was a great conversation. I think I learned a lot about your philosophy of building Jones IT, of course, and of course your experience and, uh, seeing so many of your clients go through that journey from, let's say a 20-person company to a Decacorn, like you said. So I think it was a great conversation and thank you so much for your time.

Yeah. Thank you for, and I had a great time.