Tim: 0:14

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Cables to Clouds podcast. I'm your host this week, tim, and with me, of course, as usual, is this guy over here whose name starts with a C and ends with an S.

Chris: 0:26

Yes, actually I'm right in both cases.

Tim: 0:28

Chris Miles, I'm actually good, I'm actually good. So, yes, ends with an S. Chris Miles is here with me and of course, we have a guest with us, jason Gintert, whose name you know if you're at all involved with the US Network User Group you've probably already heard or know of. But please, for everybody else, if you don't mind, go ahead and introduce yourself, jason. Welcome to the show, sure.

Jason: 0:52

Thanks, tim. Yeah, it's nice to be here, and thank you too, chris. So yeah, I'm Jason Ginnert. I am one of the co-founders and a community organizer at the US Networking User Association. I'm also CTO at a company called Lake Tech. We're a VAR and reseller based out of Cleveland, and I think today's topic we're going to talk a little bit about maybe some of the things I've done in the past too. So I've been a founder of a company, I've been a network engineer for 20 some years now, years now and, um, you know, been around the block but, you know, super excited to get in the. I really want to talk about USNUA and and then also, you know, excited about the topic of just, you know, career progression, different paths that one might take.

Jason: 1:36

So yeah, thanks for having me today guys Super, super excited about it.

Tim: 1:40

Yeah, thanks, it's great to. It's great to finally get you on there. We've tried to schedule Jason a few times and it seems like there's always some force majeure that gets in the way, but we're happy that we can finally get him on. Actually, this is a great start. Let's talk a little bit about the USNUA, because I'm sure we have at least a few listeners that may not be aware of it and they probably should, and hopefully they can get involved once they understand it. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about USNUA.

Jason: 2:07

Yeah, happy to. So USNUA is a it's a professional group for network engineering folk. So we started out in Ohio I'm based in Cleveland, ohio, and it started out as ONUB, the Ohio Networking User Group, and it was just some, you know, some local, regional guys. We decided to get together and start having these meetups because we saw VMware, the vMugs, we saw Linux user groups, there was all these different user groups, but there wasn't really like a general networking one. There was vendor-specific ones, like there's like Fuel for Palo Alto, and then there's Cisco user groups, but there wasn't like a general network engineering group. So we started in Cleveland, spread to Columbus and then Cincinnati and Toledo, so eventually we were doing one event per quarter, all around the state, you know, and it started to gain steam.

Jason: 3:01

And then, and then COVID happened and during COVID we started to try to do them virtually over zoom and you know it was, it was all right, but we, you know, obviously we're really looking forward to and longing to get back to the in-person events. So that's when we decided, well, hey, maybe we can, maybe we can recreate this, and we took time to think about all right, well, you know, we're going to get back to being in person someday. So when that happens, maybe what we can do is is take what we've developed here in Ohio and start to to to, you know, chapterize it or, you know, create a template that is recreatable, that we could take to other other places, because we did have interests from, like, you know, our adjacent states. So people in Indiana were like, hey, how do I do this? They, you know, end up coming to Ohio events or people from Michigan, and they would they'd be like, hey, can I do this where I'm at too, and how do I do it? So we decided during COVID to really create a what we called, you know, our enablement package to to help with that.

Jason: 4:04

And then we, you know, we started to actually build out an organization, you know, an umbrella organization that could have these regional networking user groups all over the place. And you know, we started here in this region and it took us a little while to get, get our feet underneath us and really figure things out. But you know, now we are at, I want to say, 37 chapters or so that we're up to at this point. I could be wrong about that number.

Jason: 4:30

Actually, our coordinators probably know better than I do where we're at these days, that the ones actually doing the work and quarterbacking these events, but yeah so, and the way the events usually look is the format they usually take is, you know, there's a local organizer, so there's a person in that region who wants to get this kicked off. We have them find, kind of you know, their twin, their pair to, so they can, kind of you know, we can have two people helping coordinate events. The best combos are, like you know, an account executive and a sales engineer, because you know what I mean, like, like the engineers know, like the good content and and you know how to get the engineers out, but the account, uh, account executives know how to throw an event.

Jason: 5:15

You know what I mean they know how to like to pick out a spot that's good and has good AV and good food and good beer Beer is an important part of it. Um, so um, but the you know the events usually run like like happy hour and so these folks in those that region try to deal, identify a venue. Um, the way that the night usually flows is, um at least this is kind of our template for success is usually have someone present on a technology. We try to make it an open technology. So a big thing about the USNUA events is they're non-selling events. So you'll see that there's sponsors who help pay for them, but they're not going to show their products or their you know their company. It's going to be about, hey, this is VXLAN and how it works.

Jason: 6:03

Or we've actually done what we call the great debate, which is a debate about layer two leaf spine versus layer three leaf spine in EVPN VXLAN, and we did it complete with podiums and a moderator, and it was like a real legit debate that we've done on election years, which was kind of fun. And then we had a presentation about like a large retail chain that actually built their own open source router that they deployed at 1600 stores, like it was just. It's just cool to have, you know, a variety of different presentations out there and have people tell tell stories in the field, and then we kind of cap the night with like a panel discussion and and and build on that. So it'll be four people that we try to have a good mix. Maybe someone from service provider, maybe someone from a bar, maybe someone from enterprise. But you know, folks talk about their day-to-day lives and in in network engineering, the problems they encounter and the things they're working on the, the technologies they're excited about. Yeah, and that's generally how it looks, and I mentioned before that there's beer. Beer is definitely an important part.

Jason: 7:11

There's food as well, usually at these events, and our team does all the coordination. So we just really, you know, we have the local organizer find the spot, make introductions to our team. Our team really runs with it, uh, does the coordination, picks out the food. Um, you know, handles a lot of the backend work that really, you know, makes uh, could, could make it difficult to run it on your own. We try to take as much of that off their plate as the as we can.

Jason: 7:38

I mean, obviously, there's only there's a few things that they are going to have to do like scoping out the event spot and you know, um, we also send out like a, an event package where they got to set up, um, certain things, the event, but, um, yeah, so that's, that's generally the idea behind these. I mean, we really just want to get the network engineering community together, uh, in person, um, and in region, to get to know one another, you know, and just a lot of great things happen at these events for sure. I've been, I've been to a number of them, so so yeah that's the USNUA in a nutshell.

Tim: 8:13

Yeah, I went to either one or two years ago, I don't remember now. Uh, I went to the one in one that was in Raleigh and, yeah, it, it exactly what I used, how you described it Right, I actually ended up being a panelist on one of the on the. I forget what it was. We were talking about cloud, something I can't remember or it was about AI. Actually, I think it was about AI at that time. Lots of them are about AI. These days.

Tim: 8:35

Yeah, it was about AI and kind of how we use it for networking. But yeah, it was good though. It was a great, great event, a great chance to network without networking, if you will, with with your fellow engineers. Learn a lot about people, just because, I mean, people don't realize how, how, how tight this community actually is. Like everybody really knows everybody. It's like not even six degrees from Kevin Bacon, it's like two and a half if you're lucky, you know. So, yeah, it's great.

Jason: 9:03

They're great events half if you're lucky, you know. So, yeah, it's great, they're great events, so true. And I find, no matter where I'm at, this happened, you know, as a phenomenon. I noticed a lot in our backyard. You'd go and you'd see someone. You're like dude, I haven't seen you in like 10 years. Like how the hell are you doing? And anywhere I go, I see that happen again and again.

Jason: 9:21

You know where these guys or people come together. They've either worked together or maybe you know, one was a customer and one was, you know, the vendor or whatever, but it's just like a reconnection of so many people you know in these regional environments. So that's a cool aspect. There's also been a lot of like. It's a really good spot for people like trying to break into the industry, to meet their local peers, you know, and to get some maybe advice from them or even find a role. So we try to, at the beginning of the events, to ask, hey, is anyone in the room hiring? And then people will raise their hands and be like, yep, I got a, I got a slot open. This is what it looks like, and then you can kind of make those connections.

Tim: 9:59

That's really good yeah.

Jason: 10:01

It's, it's pretty cool. So I mean there's lots of these ancillary effects that happen, but I mean the most important thing is just the connection, or sometimes reconnection, you know, with all those folks out there.

Tim: 10:13

Definitely. No, that's good. I definitely recommend we'll make sure we get the USNUA links and stuff in the show notes for this, in the show notes for this, uh, because, yeah, I highly recommend it, uh, for any of our listeners who are part of the networking. You know, in some uh, some capacity to to get involved and hopefully, hopefully, there is a chapter where you're at and if not, um, you know this guy's still waiting to get, to get over to australia someday, someday we're still still tackling the tackling the us.

Jason: 10:42

I think that the most difficult thing you know still tackling the, tackling the us. I think that the most difficult thing you know about getting outside of the states is just that event coordination piece and all the things that we need to do there. You know for sure for sure.

Chris: 10:54

I mean every time I go to the states, to be honest, I do have a look at the local uh network user group and see if there's anything scheduled, so I'll pop. You know it's not my local community half the time, but still it's. It's always fun to you know, converse and, like you said, beer is very important. Anywhere there's free beer, I'll probably be there, um, if I can be. So, yeah, it's fun time.

Tim: 11:17

Yeah, that brings everybody in All, right, um, okay, so let's, let's let's move on to what we wanted to do, kind of our main event. This is really good. I just want to make sure we have enough time for the main event topic. So we had Scott Raban on a few weeks ago actually, we had him on like a while back, but in terms of publishing it might have been a little longer, but yeah, so we wanted to. So we had talked to Scott about basically what, what prompted him to leave his corporate job and start his own business and also, you know, basically how did that, how did that go, how did he make the decision, how did essentially, how did it work for him and how did he figure out that he could do it and how did he make it successful. So that was a really good episode. A lot of really good information there from Scott.

Tim: 12:05

Now, jason, I know you, you know, had done what Scott did at some point and you had actually left corporate, started your own business and done it for quite a while, actually Right. And then recently, just recently, you actually went back. Like you said, you're now doing a CTO role for a VAR. So what I thought would be really interesting is to understand, kind of like, the other side of the coin. Uh, not to not to be negative about what you know mostly what sucks about running your own business, necessarily but to also you know still but, but, but to still get some information about like, okay, well, there's really good things about running your business, especially the freedom and the fact that you generally can't lay yourself off.

Tim: 12:44

But you know there's there's obviously other considerations there. So you know, I just, yeah, let's just start there. Like you, you know you said it like eight years I think. You said you were running your own business and then one day you weren't, you decided that you kind of had enough of it for now. So so kind of walk us through first of all, what made you jump in the first place to start your own business, maybe just briefly, and then, yeah, let's talk about what running your own business is like there.

Jason: 13:10

Sure, yeah, happy to go through it. So I had worked at a service provider for 13 years and based in Cleveland, and was really happy with that job. But then that company got acquired. And I'm sure you guys know how that goes when companies get acquired. Sometimes things change and the new know I gave it an honest shot, you know, I gave it, gave it a good six months, but during the time while I was there, I was kind of exploring what my options were. I would, I just turned 40 and and I'd always thought about maybe starting my own thing.

Jason: 13:42

And, um, then my friend actually, who I've known, we we've worked together Um, so the the company we ended up co-founding together. That was like the fourth time we'd worked together. So he hired me at my first dial up tech support job and then I brought him over to a place, then he brought me over to a place and then, you know, we just kind of stayed in touch forever, um, yeah, exactly, networking and networking. Um, but know, we just kind of stayed in touch forever Networking, yep, exactly Networking and networking. But he, he's like you know, I started telling him about this thing called SDWin. I'm like man, I think that this is going to be a big deal Like in 2015,.

Jason: 14:15

We'd have lunch and I was talking about it. I'm like, I think, like you know, there's some people who thought it was a fad, and you know how it goes when that stuff, that stuff's coming up like it's tough to tell, like is this real or not? And and I used it, and I remember that I specifically used, like like velo cloud and I I I remember, you know, plugging in two circuits and unplugging like the main one, and it just like failing over and like I was like I didn't leave. I dropped like one ping, like I don't, I've never seen anything like this.

Jason: 14:43

It just kind of blew my mind and I was telling him about it. He's like, why don't we just start a company to deploy this and manage it? We could do that. I'm like, yeah, maybe we could. And I was still interviewing around, still exploring my options, but then he talked me into it. He's like, let's go for it, man. And so then we incorporated. And it was actually we incorporated like four months before I actually left the job, so I was still there, but we were trying to, you know, side hustle and and get a get our first customer, cause I didn't want to like jump off with no revenue, you know.

Jason: 15:14

So, we did. We landed up a pretty nice size retailer, um, where, where we could be consultants. It wasn't like an SDWAN opportunity yet, it was just consulting, but then that was it. I mean, we were kind of off to the races, I you know, and then I put in my notice and it was just the two of us at first, so I mean the way, the way that it worked out actually from the beginning till the end of the relationship that I did a lot of the. I did like all the engineering, sales solutions, architecture, all that stuff was all like it, all me. And then he was kind of back a house so he did it, dealt with all the billing and all that. You know all the stuff that basically I didn't want to, I'm not good at, nor nor do I want to deal with it, um, so, but he was very good at it and liked it, so it was a. It was a, you know, it was a good partnership.

Jason: 15:58

So, um, yeah, we started off in 2016 and, I'm not gonna lie, the first two years were kind of rough. I mean, it was like you know making, you know making half of the money I did before. All right. Then then I did in like 2015, in 2016 maybe got it up to a you know a little more than half, and in in 2017, but it was still. It was tight. You know, it was like, you know, had to, had to really tighten the belt at home and, and you know, say hey, there's certain things that we, we just can't afford. While, while we're ramping up, yeah, so that that was.

Jason: 16:29

That was. Yeah, that was definitely a difficult part of that.

Tim: 16:32

Yeah, so actually this is a good point. So I mean, obviously the ramping up portion probably is the hardest. It's both the hardest and the longest part to to get working Right. And I assume that's what you're talking about when you say that you know it took a little while to. You know you're making half of what you made at the previous job. So yeah, how did you? How did you like? I mean, obviously you went and you just started consulting, like I'm curious, did you just like ads in the newspaper? Like how were you finding? How were you finding it was?

Jason: 17:01

it was my personal network. So in my previous role I'd been in engineering but I'd kind of moved over to solutions architecture. Well, back then sales engineering, now it's solutions architecture. But so I got to meet a lot of people in the industry and I just kind of started to go out and ask people do you need help with anything? Do you need help with any projects or do you have anything going on? And it was really just at first just a consulting hustle, just hey, can I help you with any projects on an hourly basis? But juggling that, you know it's tough. And the other thing is, you know, if there's anything I've learned that the larger the organization, the more difficult it is to get paid.

Jason: 17:41

So it's just you know, when you submit an invoice and there's a lot of people who go off to start their own thing that think like you just submit an invoice and you get paid I'll be the first to tell you like that's not. That's usually not how it happens, and it's usually the larger the organization they are, the more difficult it is to. And it's I don't think it's anybody's being malicious or anything, it's just they're large.

Jason: 18:05

Yeah, exactly, large institutions with a lot of bureaucracy and things get caught up and you know when you're expecting, when you're putting, like you know, 15, 30 day terms on your invoice, but you're taking 60 or 90 days to get paid, which is the reality at some of these places. Um, it's just kinda yeah, it's, it can be tough. So, I mean, that's one of the first things I would say. I think that's like one of those things that that with running your own, your own company is like managing cashflow.

Jason: 18:33

It's just, it's a it's a it's something you're always having to deal with. So I mean, that's kind of what was the reality for us at the beginning and, like I said, it was like a larger company we work with. And I mean, once you got into a groove I think everything was cool. But you know, whenever you'd bring on a new customer you're always kind of feeling each other out and trying to figure out.

Jason: 18:52

You know how this works and all that, but that was one thing I learned really early. And then you know, that was one thing I learned really early. So, and then you know, as time goes on, you're still trying to ramp that cash flow up, but you also need more resources to grow, you know. So we actually ended up hiring our first employee in early 2017. And dude, I like I'm not, I'm not kidding, like I lost sleep about that.

Tim: 19:14

I'm like About having somebody depending on you for.

Jason: 19:19

Correct. Yeah, this dude like relying on me for a paycheck, like because when it was just me and my partner, like it was like eh, who cares? Like we're both in this together, it's not a big deal. Like we both know the risks and we're willing, well, and your owners right.

Tim: 19:30

So your stake is higher and yeah, like it's yeah exactly so.

Jason: 19:35

Then then we hired this first guy. And it was funny because it's like a competitive situation, like he was thinking about taking another job and I'm like no dude, you really need to come over here. And we talked him into it. And then I'm like, wait, like what if that doesn't work out? And I just talked him out of that job and like there's all this stuff going on in my, in my mind, but I was really I to be able to run a little faster. Then, um, then it became easier. And that second employee that we hired, it was like it was just like okay, now I know how this goes, and like we could just get that guy in and we can just keep going. So, um, so yeah.

Jason: 20:10

Then then you know, I would say like those first two years were rough. The next two it started to kind of level out and and and like we started to get, you know, some traction. The SD-WAN started to take off too. So it was. It took a little while, especially we're we're in Ohio. Like Ohio is kind of a it's a very like conservative sort of mindset in Ohio, like nobody really wants to stick their neck out and take a chance on something new. So it took us a little. It took, you know, sd-wan becoming a little more mainstream for it to finally get traction.

Tim: 20:42

So that's true, yeah, and that is right around the time, yeah, when it really started becoming a household name, if you will like. Before it was kind of what is this? And you know, is it like you said, is it a fad or whatever? And then, yeah, I remember I was working at Cisco, started there in 2016. And, yeah, like right around 2017, like I think it was right around that. I mean, cisco had been pushing IWAN for a few years before that as an SD-WAN and technically accurate, it's an SD-WAN, but although it's super complicated right, it was because it was so freaking complicated that people weren't adopting it. I think you know you remember the book that's like 30 inches thick or whatever but, yeah, the truly commoditized solution as a solution, I think SD-WAN, yeah, like right around that time, really started taking off.

Jason: 21:30

Definitely did. Yeah, and we had, you know, we repped Velo, a few different platforms so we had, like Tulare and which a lot of people don't know who Tulare is. It's an interesting little side story. Tulare was eventually bought by Oracle, but they were really the first ones to really develop SD-WAN and that's actually the chief architect of VeloCloud came from Tulare.

Tim: 21:54

Oh, interesting.

Jason: 21:55

And he kind of took what he learned Like the difference, and just kind of took what he learned like the the difference, um, and just a kind of like a like, kind of a nerdy, like a uh inside okay, on, on, you know kind of how that came to be talari, really, the, the control plane was in in the boxes so you can only scale so far.

Jason: 22:11

They all kind of knew like the state of the network. And then what, what velo clouding. Well, craig figured out and took the velo cloud is if you decouple that control plane, you put it in the cloud, it scales as big as you want.

Tim: 22:22

Yeah, that's right.

Jason: 22:23

And that's what he did, and then the cloud gateways and all the cool stuff that they did. So you know it was. It was a you know VeloCloud was. I still feel like it's a really great product. I don't know if you guys have seen the of the murmurs about it maybe going to Arista, so kind of excited about that.

Tim: 22:39

We just recorded the news yesterday and that was one of our stories we were talking about, so I am interested to see yeah, I think we're both very interested to see what Arista does with it Ultimately. Are they going to integrate it, Are they going to hold it at arm's length like Meraki style, or what are they going to do with it?

Jason: 22:54

Yeah, that'll be interesting Because I mean, I don't never really see them integrate anything into like their EOS code base. It's usually like they keep it separate. If they're going to, they don't try to do like Cisco did with like the sidecar thing, like that they did with iOS and SD-WAN, you know which. In a lot of ways, I feel like that's what hindered that product. You know a lot. I think they should have just, you know, done the work, made it native and and it would have been okay. But that that like having to sidecar it then having to refactor to make it native later, like it, just that was kind of a mess.

Tim: 23:30

Yeah, so I worked at Cisco at that time and there was a pretty hot internal debate about whether we should just let fiptela keep innovating and like delivering, or but they just put a stop to it essentially for like a year and a half and all like all the competitors at that point caught up feature-wise and and the ios xc still didn't work at that point, so it was a little bit of a problem I mean they did let it run on its own for a little while, right?

Chris: 23:55

because I mean, yeah, when you first bought it, yeah, you could still buy the V-Edge.

Tim: 24:00

At that point. Yeah, that's because they didn't have iOS XE right, but they stopped development on Viptela as a product so that they could integrate it into the iOS XE trains. So like all the features that Velo, that Viptela had on the roadmap, like basically just didn't happen, right.

Jason: 24:19

Yeah, it was that whole V edge versus C edge. You know, you started out with V edge, which was the native platform. To your point, chris, they did. They did start out that way and and I we had a lot of customers that were kind of hybrids, so they had a lot of old V edge stuff and then they kind of switched to C edge over time and, um, that was that was just a wild ride seeing that whole transition, Because Viptela was a big deal and then, just like you said, tim, it seemed like they put the brakes on product development-wise, all new features stopped and everything stopped to kind of cram it into an ISR and then it just I don't know, they lost a lot of momentum there.

Tim: 24:55

That's what I mean. Yeah, exactly.

Chris: 24:57

And then there was a brief period in time where you could order the routers and you they lost a lot of momentum there. I feel like that's what I mean. Yeah, exactly, and that's well sorry. And then there was a brief period in time where you could order the routers and you specified whether you wanted to get running XE or running the Viptela OS, and that was fun.

Tim: 25:10

That's when I learned that, like one model, they had one model for that.

Chris: 25:13

Yeah, exactly it was like the 1100 or something like that. But like the 1100 or something like that. But yeah, and then that's what it was. Yeah, half the time it was not delivered with the os that I wanted because we were trying to do the viptela os. But you know, I digress, let's move on. Yeah one.

Tim: 25:27

One thing I will say is that the v edges were, uh, the v edge, like the 100s or whatever, the little white boxes oh, they were all white boxes from viptela really, but like the little ones, uh, their throughput was absolutely atrocious, like that was the. That was. That was one of the things that Cisco like. So Cisco it might and I don't mean to make this like an SD-WAN episode, it's not but in my opinion, cisco should have kept selling Viptela while people wanted it and were using it and already invested in the hardware, but they should have also, at the same time, been trying to get it on the next generation of ISRs, so that, I think, would have worked better.

Jason: 26:01

Agree, agree, and look at the success they had with Meraki. Like I think, meraki is the best thing that Cisco's ever bought, in my opinion, like it's just steady, eddie, and they just left it alone. It just keeps running, keeps doing its own thing, and I mean I think now they're starting to integrate some of the products years later, but I mean they just let them keep rolling. And you're right, I think they should have done the same thing with Viptela.

Jason: 26:25

So I hope. All that to say, I hope Arista does the right thing for VeloCloud and just keeps kind of the tech you know its own thing and keeps on rolling. It's really great stuff, but I guess that's actually a good segue into some of the other things that we got into in.

Jason: 26:41

WAN Dynamics because we did a lot of Arista stuff too. So if we were still doing the whole WAN Dynamics thing today we'd be like hell. Yeah, like Fellow's going to be part of Arista, that's great. Like you know, marriage of two vendors we were already working with, but yeah. So I mean I guess you know kind of getting back to the journey, you know things in that middle part really, you know we're pretty sweet, we were growing, we were adding more team members. You know, covid was a crazy time. We actually we had explosive growth during that time, though Interesting.

Jason: 27:16

Because, everybody was scrambling to figure out their remote access solution oh, yeah, yeah, yeah Okay. So we sold and helped integrate a lot of cloud-based remote access stuff.

Tim: 27:30

Of course.

Jason: 27:31

We were Apollo resellers, so we did a lot of Prisma access and helped people get onboarded onto that to handle it, or we would, you know, be buying licenses and deploying them. I mean, during the first, it was like in 2020, in the spring, when things really kicked off. It was like it got quiet for a little bit and then, like right around this time five years ago, like in May, it just started going nuts. People were like because they realized, okay, yeah, are we are in this for a little while. We need to, we need to get a plan together and everybody just started, you know, like executing on stuff that they'd been thinking about for a while you know, as far as like work from home and you know, work from anywhere, sort of uh sort of deployments, but they, they just, you know, push down the gas pedal on that stuff.

Jason: 28:17

And so we actually had were our engineers were doing, like three to five maintenance windows a week, just you know, doing upgrades, applying licenses, putting in new boxes, like it was just constant. We gave everybody like a, you know a five percent bump during that time. Be like, just stick it out, like we're all gonna, you know, we're all in this together, we're're all going to make it Um and and it and we did. And it was weird because it then it quieted, quieted down you know, after everybody wants us to play exactly and everybody's working and on there on the new stuff they're working remotely.

Jason: 28:48

Then it was like quiet for a little bit after that and then because I think everybody was waiting to see what was going to happen, you know we kept busy through that period and then after and it was going great for a long time but then the SD-WAN market kind of got saturated, the managed SD-WAN market.

Tim: 29:08

It really did.

Jason: 29:09

And it got tougher and tougher to compete as, like, an over-the-top provider, like if we weren't able to bundle it with something else because you had a lot of the carriers out there taking SD-WAN and bundling with other stuff like circuits and voice and all this other stuff that we didn't sell.

Tim: 29:24

Yeah, like Verizon and stuff. Yeah, yeah, verizon.

Jason: 29:26

Windscreen AT&T, and some were positioning it as a loss leader. So they were like either selling it at cost or selling it so cheap, because they wanted all of the business, they wanted to get the circuits and the voice and they could do these package deals that we couldn't do, and so it was getting tougher to compete from that standpoint. And you know I'd mentioned some of the challenges with growing a company and you know then you also have to think about, you know, fueling that growth and you know, borrowing money and all the stuff that comes with the day to day of running a business.

Jason: 30:06

And you know I've been friends with, you know my partner, for a long time. I think we'll be friends for a long time to come, like we've known each other since 1999, like 26 years of being friends. Other since since 1999, like 26 years of being friends. But you know, there was a point where we started to disagree on how the how to go forward.

Jason: 30:25

You know it's tough. Yeah, I mean, we had. So, you know, probably about two years ago, we started to look at the makeup of the business and go well, you know, in order to grow this, we're either going to have to, you know, pour more money into it or make some changes. And you know, I think we differed on how that growth strategy was going to work. Like we just we just thought about it differently and we decided to come together and come up with a plan, like, say, to say okay, like we're going to go forward with this plan and if this doesn't work, then then we'll have to figure something else out. Actually, at the time, I had started to become a little bit disenfranchised with the business too, and it was just getting. It was going to be tough on me and so I gave it that.

Tim: 31:05

Well, it's stress, right? Yeah, I mean obviously.

Jason: 31:08

It was. It was and I hate to say it, but in some ways I started to become disinterested in my role. I to become disinterested in, like my role, like I'd always gotten forced into being the sales guy and I didn't want to be the sales guy. And it turns out just finding good salespeople is really hard and building a good sales culture is really hard. We were super good at engineering and operations Like we were. We could, we could execute all day. But what we couldn't do was just like and we were good at selling into our existing base because they all loved like. When we had a customer on because we were so good at operations and engineering, they loved us. The problem was we were. We were terrible about telling the world about ourselves.

Tim: 31:45

You know what I mean.

Jason: 31:45

So like selling to the outside world, marketing and sales and getting new customers. Like we just sucked at it, we just were, we just could not get that right and we kept trying new sales people and new sales strategies and and we kept trying new sales people and new sales strategies and it always kept landing on me and I'm like and people would tell me like hey, but you're great at sales. I'm like, but I don't.

Tim: 32:03

I don't want to do sales. You know what I mean it's like.

Jason: 32:08

It's like, um, you know, I equated it to like, you know, let's say you're like seven foot tall and everyone's like, hey, you should play basketball. Like yeah, but maybe not every person who's seven foot tall wants to play basketball. You know what I mean. Like like, I may have some of the attributes that to, to you know, be decent at sales, but it's not. It's not what I want to do day in, day out. It's not like I don't want to like, sit there and manage a sales team and drive a pipeline, and you know what I mean yeah, totally get it totally not in my dna.

Jason: 32:33

So, like we just couldn't make it work and I just was getting frustrated with that kept falling to me, so decided to give it like this 18 month plan to see if we could pull it together. We tried a new sales leader. It didn't work out and it was just kind of like, okay, it's time to call it. So you know, my partner and I decided, um, you know it's, either you know we're gonna have to like buy one of us, one of the other is gonna buy each other out, or, you know, do we look for a buyer? Like, how do you go about like exiting? It's right we were actually 50, 50 partners.

Jason: 33:02

So it's that's a challenging thing, um, so you know, um. So we went through a process and and, and decided, okay, like I think that the best course of action for us is actually to exit the business. Um, and so we took it to market. We ended up buying a buyer, uh, and then my, then my partner decided he's like I'm not, I don't want to go with the you know whoever's buying.

Tim: 33:23

Oh, yeah, yeah, you don't want to stay with a buyer, okay, sure.

Jason: 33:26

He's. Actually he runs the USNUA. That's his baby now, like he he's. So we did that together, um, we kind of co-founded it together. Uh, and along with there's there's a few local people who who assisted as well. The. The local Arista team here in in in Ohio is awesome and those guys helped build it. Um and um. Uh, he just went to run that full time and I went over. I actually went with the acquiring company and, um, and you know, gave it a shot to work for them. Unfortunately, that did not work work out and I ended up leaving.

Tim: 33:58

You know my role there it's probably hard to you know this, this business you've built and you wanted to sell it Right. But, like now that you've sold it, you probably have still had strong opinions about things that were happening in the. You know in the business that I totally get it.

Jason: 34:14

Absolutely. You nailed it. Like there was just so many things about that I was so opinionated about. I'm like you can't do that. You got to do it this way and and then the the other thing was just like. It was like having three jobs, cause it was like they put me in a new role. It was like heading up the solution architecture team, but they also had like pretty much all my old roles too, you know, because like that stuff wasn't going away. We still largely operated as the same company inside this new company, but then I was also had additional responsibilities.

Jason: 34:42

I also had to travel a bunch, so I I got yeah, I got United Platinum last year Cause I, you know, I had 40 legs and I, I, um, I just burned out. I was like I can't like.

Chris: 34:51

I'm done.

Jason: 34:52

I was already kind of the point of burning out with just wind dynamics and then that just kind of added fuel to the fire when, when we with just wind dynamics, and then that just kind of added fuel to the fire when, when we, we sold to that company. So I mean, no dis on them, great company. I wish them the best. It just wasn't. It was. It was a bad time for me. Um, it was, um, it was a hard experience and um, you know, yeah, I mean no regrets about about any of the decisions we made. Um, but it was just a. It was a tough time. So I decided to take some time off. I took about four months off.

Jason: 35:20

The first two months I really just decompressed. I didn't do anything. It was in December, it was right around the holidays Good timing, yeah. Just hung out with family and decompressed. I was barely on my laptop or doing anything during that time, just really recovering from previous years experience. And then I just started to think about, like what's next? What do I want to do? Do I want to start something or do I want to work for someone? And I weighed that for a long time and I ended up. You know, bits and flight is something I incorporated before, so it's actually an LLC that I have. And I thought to myself I'm like I could just take this LLC, create a company out of it, do some consulting, do whatever I want with it. It might be a great option. But then I started to think about the early days of wind dynamics.

Jason: 36:15

I started to think about the, the ramp and the building and the stress and the chasing bills and and all that stuff. And and this time it was just I'm on my own. It's not like last time. I had, at least, you know, a partner and he could take some of the stuff that he was good at, and I could take some of the stuff I'd be at this time around. Granted, I've learned a lot and I could probably do some of that stuff. But, Andy, I suppose I mean, if I even made enough money at it, I could, I could hire people to do some of these things. But I don't know. When I thought about it I was like, maybe I just want to get a job, you know, maybe I just want to. There's something to be said about, you know, health care. That just kind of comes as a benefit, and know cause.

Tim: 36:56

You know like buying healthcare not under you know, not having an underemployer, it's very expensive, it's extremely expensive in the U S at least.

Jason: 37:07

Yeah, definitely true, it's. It's just so. When I was like eyeing that up and then the kind of the stress of building something and like getting all that going again, I was just like I really want to find someone to work for. Um and Lake tech. Um, uh, fantastic company that I've I've known for a long time. It's actually 36 year old company this year. They started out in PBXs and then they've they've evolved into it services and they've done all kinds of cool stuff over the years.

Jason: 37:32

Um, and I've always I've known them, admired them from afar. I always thought that it just got to talking with them about their vision and, and, crazy enough, like they're kind of picking up where wind dynamics left off in a lot of ways. Um, just their, their vision and the strategy for the company. So got really excited about that. And, um, uh, at first I you know it was tough cause I was like I don't know if I want to be someone's. I just gone through, you know, having somebody else be my boss last year. I don't, I and I, I really thought about this way, like I don't, I don't want to feel owned. You know, at this point I've, I've, I. For eight years I've done it on my own and or not on my own, and we had a great team of people. I can't take credit for all of it at you know by by no means.

Tim: 38:23

I know what you mean, though, when you say that though, like literally, like you owned your own destiny, not, someone wasn't telling you what to do, right, yeah, I get it, yeah exactly Exactly.

Jason: 38:33

So, um, so that was it was. It was like tough to come to grips with and we went back and forth and but eventually they, they swayed me, they, they, they, uh, convinced me to, to take a chance. So so I'm at Lake tech now and there are some things to be said. You know, like, like I, I mean, I guess one of the the uh things I've had to adjust to is being in the office. So I haven't been in the office for, like you know, eight, nine years yeah, a long time. And so now I'm in the office. At first it was like five days a week, I'm like about three, so we worked that out. The cool thing is they were really flexible and willing to work with me on that. So, but you know, I'm going to the office, which is great. I mean, I actually do really like the in-person experience and the camaraderie and working alongside your peers and being in the office together. It's a cool thing.

Chris: 39:27

Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for it. It's something I'm doing with my recent job that I started and it's nice. I've been remote for like the last like nine years, so just having the option of going into the office was not even there for me for a long time, but it's nice. I don't want to be back in five days a week, but it's nice to have the option.

Jason: 39:48

I am right there with you. Yeah, like I said, I gave it a shot. I think that the first couple of weeks I was like let's back this up, back this down a little bit. But I completely agree with you, it's, there's something about the option in person.

Jason: 39:59

Yeah, exactly it is, it really is so. So, yeah, so that's, it's been great. I really enjoy, um, you know, working somewhere like my work day can end at five. I don't have to deal with all like the the really tough decisions anymore. They don't really roll up to me, there's someone else who does that and I can just focus on doing my job. So I got this, the cto role, which is really the role I really wanted to have at wayne dynamics but just never really was was allowed to you know what I mean.

Jason: 40:26

Like I really there were just so many things that you get pulled into as an owner of a company or co-owner of a company that you just don't have a choice.

Jason: 40:36

You've got to make a call and some of those things were really hard to do and it was usually around like personnel or customers Usually like the toughest calls were related to people, you know, and it was like like just things would happen and you'd be like man, I don't want to, I don't want to make this decision, but I have to, whether it was like lack of performance from a person, like it just wasn't working out, or somebody was going through something difficult in their personal life and you had to, like, fill the hole from them being gone. But you, you know, you sucked it up and did it, but it still sucked. You know there's, there's just all those things that happen, that that it's just, it's tough when, when the buck stops at you, you know, and that that was ultimately, I guess, not having some of that stuff, I can. I can focus on the day-to-day, day-to-day gig and and hopefully do a good job at the end of the day.

Chris: 41:26

Yeah, so we've we've kind of talked at length with with you as well as with Scott, about you know kind of the difficult pieces, about you know, before you go out on your own and start your own business right, a lot of the planning that you have to do and things like that you know, moving back into your quote unquote corporate job. Was there anything else that you found difficult kind of going, going back into that role or into that kind of world of you know having a boss and things like that, or was it purely just a mindset shift to go back into that space?

Jason: 41:57

No, there was. I think that the thing that I struggle most with is like, though it's a relief not to have the final say, sometimes it sucks not having the final say about certain things. You know, when you have a strong opinion about something, it's not your call anymore, so you have to, you know, let loose of that. Um, so I, I did, I did struggle with that transition a little bit. There's been a couple of times where you know, I, I, I had to to uh realize, like this is not my call, it's there, it's, you know, ultimately it's their decision. Um, so I think that that's one of the difficult things, um, the other thing is, um, just knowing, like I don't have the institutional knowledge of this place. It's a 36 year old place, right?

Jason: 42:38

So like just understanding where everything is and how to get things done. And it's, you know, it's not. It's you know they're around 50 people that work there, so it's not not huge, but it's not, it's not tiny. So there's, you know, just getting to know everybody and how things work and and be acquainted with all those things. I guess it's all the natural stuff that you'd have with starting a new job. But I'm still figuring out a lot of those things.

Jason: 43:04

When you get into a position like that, like the CTO role, you want to make an impact, you want to come in and you want to make changes, but at the same time you have to take a step back and really evaluate the environment and what they already have, because you might come in with these things you think are bright ideas, but there might be reasons why they can or can't do. That you know right off the rip. So I guess, just getting ramped up and understanding the environment and trying to make smart choices about changes to implement off the bat, but you know again at the same time, like you might make those recommendations and they might not want to do it. So sometimes that you know, depending on on uh, what, what you're trying to accomplish.

Chris: 43:51

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess at the same time, if it's not your decision, it's also not your fault, right? So you get to that's a good point.

Jason: 44:04

That's a good point. I, I totally get that I would say I told you so or anything. But yeah, you're right.

Tim: 44:11

Yeah, totally get that. No, this has been good and it's good to know. You know, like running your business I think running your own business is just hard, right. Like not everybody's meant to do it, not everybody has the chops Like I would rather be just like you, right. Like if I was going to run my own business I'd have to find somebody who wanted to do the payroll and the you know, it's all the business stuff that I know for a fact. I just would really suck at it's hard, right, it's hard. And there's also that constant pressure. I mean, I'm not telling you anything, jason, I'm just saying out loud. I think there's this constant pressure to grow as a business. Right Like, there's. No, you know you're, and it's just. I think it's societal to some degree as well. Right Like, you just have to keep getting bigger, you have to keep making more money, you have to. You know that's what success looks like in a business and that's hard, right, I think that's that's also very hard.

Jason: 45:00

Yeah, you're right, and you know I said before I didn't have any regrets, but maybe I do have a regret around, maybe not facing that mindset and maybe being happy with a modest amount of growth. I think we'd grown a lot quickly early on, especially during that COVID phase, and we grew a lot during that time and then, when the growth started to dry up a couple years ago, we were still able to keep the lights on. You know, we were still there was, but there was a lot of, and that was, you know, something we had to deal with too, with like there was a lot of sentiment in the company Like we're go, like we're going under because it was slow. You know it was slow. And then you start to like, like you get a lot of people that are just concerned with like well, I'm not seeing new orders, so we must be going out of business. But that wasn't the case. Like we were, we were flat, we weren't growing, but we were um, you know.

Tim: 45:53

But we were shrinking either, really right.

Jason: 45:55

Exactly. We were just kind of flat and we were able to pay the bills because fortunately it was a monthly recurring service offering. We had a managed service and it was a we were able to cover our expenses and it wasn't a big deal. But we had a lot of idle people just wondering what the hell's going on.

Jason: 46:09

And you're right that's tough, it's tough to figure out, to solve that problem and to keep everybody sane and rowing in the right direction and all of those things. Because it's just, yeah, it is a tough balance because you will have those seasons in the business where things change, the market changes, or you get to a certain size revenue wise, where things change for you, whether it's, you know, tax implications or the way you do accounting or, um, or the way you borrow money. There's just all of that stuff and you have to have this, you know, hopefully a really good team of professionals around you to help you with, advise you on those things. But it's just, it's a constant, it's it's constant, it's just there's always something you know.

Tim: 46:56

So and that's that's the one thing that's probably attractive about, you know, going back to corporate life is that at least you don't have to juggle. It's not going to be like every day there's going to be a new kick, a new kick to the teeth to deal with. So I get that.

Jason: 47:12

Yeah, and that is, there's consistency. You know like I can look at my calendar and know generally what my day is going to look like, whereas before my day could have been blown up by a situation that's like no one else can deal with this. So you deal with it. You know that's. It's a misconception. I think, um, that a lot of people have that. That people think, oh, that's great. You know, when you, when you have a, uh, a business, you're your own boss, you're actually your employees. You know you, you you have to report to your employees, you report to your customers, your stakeholders, your stake.

Jason: 47:44

Yeah, the stakeholders are ultimately your boss, which is everybody you know, really everybody who depends on you. Yeah, well said.

Chris: 47:57

In some instances, your own tack as well, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jason: 48:01

everything you know it's just becomes a lot of responsibilities. The bigger you get, the more customers you have, the more employees you add, the more vendors you add. All of that stuff just starts to compound. So yeah, it certainly can be trying. I'm not saying it's not without its merits. It really is nice to have a company that you earn a check from. If you're fortunate enough that there's extra profit, you get dividends or S-corp distributions, so those things are nice.

Jason: 48:30

you could probably get a company car and you know there's, there's all these tax stuff and all that exactly like like tax write-offs were for certain stuff, like there's there's a lot of nice things to come with it, but it's. There definitely are some trade-offs. So I don't want to make it seem like all doom and gloom, but you do have to to have a thick skin, like you're going to have. You're going to go through some times where things suck and you're just going to have to suck it up and just get through it. Um and that's that's just yeah, that's just part of it.

Tim: 49:01

That's great. I think that's a really good place to uh, to, to, to cut it because, uh, I think I don't think there's anything. Knowing that you can get through it, I think is good. So, all right, I'll go ahead and wrap it up here. Jason, any first of all, one of two things, right? Well, first of all, any final thoughts, and second of all, where can people find you on the interweb?

Jason: 49:22

I really appreciate you guys having me on and I'm glad we made it happen. So last time you mentioned there's like a force, what do you say? Force majeure? And it literally was a flood at my house that prevented me from coming on, so this time we made it work. Thank you, it was really cool to be here with you guys.

Chris: 49:39

I love your show.

Jason: 49:41

As far as places to find me online, I'm active on LinkedIn, bits and Flight on, mostly, like, I think, blue sky. I think I got an Instagram account that I probably don't post much to, but, um, you know, bits in flight is my, you know, the my kind of side thing and, um, you know, if I'm ever doing anything, uh, as far as, like, I've been a part of field day and stuff like that. So, um, usually blog under bits and flightcom. You'll find some content there, so awesome. But yeah, thanks again for having me guys. Really.

Tim: 50:10

Yeah, and thanks for thanks for coming. Uh, anything in, chris, you want to leave us with any pearls of wisdom?

Chris: 50:17

I got nothing today. Man, I'm fresh out. I don't have much wisdom, uh, any days, but especially this All right.

Tim: 50:24

Fair enough, all right. Well, thanks for everybody for tuning in. This has been, of course, another episode of the Capables to Clouds podcast. We'll see you next time.