Transcript

Paul Ford The Pope’s email is probably the least sexy email you’ve ever seen in your life.

Rich Ziade This is probably true. I don’t know what the signature looks like. I’m curious if anybody has gotten emails from the Pope, please forward them along to hello@postlight—[Rich chuckles] [music fades in, plays alone for 16 seconds, ramps down].

RZ Hey Paul.

PF Hey Rich. 

RZ How are you doing?

PF I’m….doing fine. Gettin’ buy in a crazy mixed up world.

RZ Yes yes, yes!

PF How are you doing?

RZ I’m doing good. I’m doing good. I cannot complain. Even though I, I would. Maybe we’ll make that a different podcast where we complain.

PF Alright, Rich, what’s on your mind?

RZ Well, that’s a lot, Paul. I mean, I have a lot on my mind. And some of it falls within the scope of this podcast. Some of it doesn’t. I said something a few weeks ago, where I said ‘software is secondary’. And that’s very controversial. 

PF A hell of a thing for software focused firm to say.

RZ Yeah, that’s a lot to say. But you know I what I meant by it—and it’s, it’s one of those things that’s kind of trying to be a little provocative, in the world of software at least, that’s about as provocative as it gets. [Rich chuckles]

PF We’re marketing. Let’s not go too—yeah.

RZ I mean the trust is most businesses are not software companies. Most businesses use software. Software companies, like Dropbox or Salesforce, software is not secondary. Software is primary. But, for Walmart—as much as they’ll tell you that software is the heart of Walmart—software is secondary. And it’s the case for most companies. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that you get two kinds of stakeholders when it comes to software.

PF Alright, stakeholder meaning like somebody at one of these companies who is in charge of a big software project.

RZ Yes, either in charge of making it real, in charge of what happens next year, like just involved in some way.

PF CEO sits down and says, ”Alright, I’m giving you the budget. Go get our HR system or go get our online catalog into shape.”

02:06 

RZ That’s right. [okay] So, these stakeholders, I think there are two distinct kinds of stakeholders. The first is what I call the ‘detente stakeholder’. The term detente comes out of diplomacy. And what it essentially means is, ”We’re not friends. But we both have really, really big missiles. So why don’t we just call it a day and chill?”

PF ”I don’t want to get blown up. You don’t want to get blown up. I don’t want to blow you up!”

RZ Exactly!

PF So, but, wait, wait. What is that—who is this between? Like, it’s them and software? 

RZ Yes! They don’t view software as theirs. They view software as this thing that they have to keep peace with.

PF So every now and then you have to go to Finland and go to a farmhouse and sit there with software. [Rich laughs]

RZ Right, and the Swiss will broker the deal—

PF And sign a, sign a treaty. 

RZ That’s right. [yeah] So what are they dealing with? They’re dealing with things like, ”I need this just not blow up on me.” Right? So I got to make sure I’ve got the latest security patches. I’ve got to make sure that it’s stable. And I got to make sure it can scale. It’s the classic sort of CTO checklist. 

PF I can give you a pure example [oh no] of this kind of CTO, somebody I worked for years and years ago who said, ”We’re gonna get a CMS!” [mhmm] ”And it’s gonna be great. It needs to cost half a million dollars.” [okay] That was the spec. [right] Like just, ”That’s how much complexity I’ll deal with. I got the budget.” [yeah] ”Find the CMS that cost that much.” [yep] ”Bye.”

RZ ”Put it in the box.” Right?

PF Let me be clear, that was not a successful project. 

RZ Right. Exactly. Now look, the best CTO—some of the most successful CTOs—are experts in risk mitigation, and not much more. I don’t mean that as an insult, because for a lot of CTOs, they are succeeding if nothing blows up, and things are scaling [sure] and things are stable. Like that’s all they want out of software.

03:54 

PF Software is secondary. [right] Software is secondary! When you work for a big chemical company, nobody’s saying ”God, we need to have the best HR system in the world.”

RZ Correct. Now, every so often, the competition shows up. So the CEO calls the CTO in, because the CTO has the word ‘technology’ in his title. So he calls him in and says, ”The bank across the street, I just used their app, and you can take a picture of your cheque and you can deposit the money. Why doesn’t mine do that?” Obviously, I need a plan. Right? So now all of a sudden, the detente stakeholder—who’s just looking to keep the peace—has pressure coming at them. So they have to react to that. But they don’t like that. They don’t like it because it’s annoying and it’s just mostly because of, it’s coming out of pressure. It’s reactive. They don’t like it. They don’t want to innovate. They don’t care to. I’m painting a very negative picture here. But look, CTOs of very, very large companies are thinking about these kinds of terrible scenarios and avoiding them.

PF Well and this could be a really big hospital system. [yeah!] It could be a not-for-profit that provides homeless shelters and is funded partially by government money. Like I’ve seen these patterns. It’s not simply like the monster who sits there and says no to everything because they’re at the top of a multi-billion dollar company and they hate all change. It’s people with limited budgets, lots of competing interests and often, like really complicated governance issues. The Catholic Church has to buy IT services, right? [yeah] Like I mean, and then it has to buy it globally, and in the in the US. [yeah] Like the Pope has email. [right] You got to deal with that.

RZ Right. You got to deal with that. Exactly. And that’s not sexy. It’s not the coolest thing in the world. So then there’s another kind of stakeholder, Paul, I want to talk about. And then I’m going to make it all—I’m going to mush them together. So the next kind of stakeholders I want to talk about is the ‘dreamer stakeholder’. So we talked about the ‘detente stakeholder’, who view software as sort of this adversary across the ocean that you don’t want to go to war with, but you also don’t want to be too sheepish around. So there’s sort of this balance of power. The ‘dreamer’s stakeholder’ views software as theirs—not only as theirs, but as full of posibility.

06:01 

PF This is when they hire them coming out of Google or Microsoft.

RZ Ohhhhh, that often doesn’t end well. Yes. But—

PF Lot of times, yeah, they come from the tech industry with a lot of ideas about how change can happen, because they’ve seen it and done it inside of tech. And now they’re, they’re coming to big firms. 

RZ Exactly! Exactly. 

PF They got the dream.

RZ Yeah, and sometimes, look, sometimes it’s that narrative. Sometimes it’s just the person who just loves the possibility and the potential of innovating with software, right? And they would love to walk into the CEOs office and say, ”Listen, we need to make a big investment, okay, because all that furniture we sell, they want to see it in their houses in real time, and I need $3 million so I can make an augmented reality app that lets me take any product and put it in my kitchen so I can see what it looks like.” You’re probably going to get the CEO that pauses. Every so often, very rarely though, you get the CEO that truly loves technology that’s always pushing the envelope. You probably don’t have that CEO.

PF Well what you’re doing, I mean, look, you and I run Postlight, right? And when we’re evaluating opportunities, new employees, things we could do, you can do infinite things, but you can’t afford them. So—

RZ You can’t afford them! And that’s an innovative like sort of forward thinking idea. Sometimes it’s like the dreamer stakeholder just saying ”Hey, guess what? I’m not patching this anymore. It’s been 20 years of this legacy piece of shit. And it’s time for the full reboot.”

PF Listen, man, we’re in a pandemic. I’m gonna go with the revenue I know, [correct] rather than the revenue that is, you know, really wonderful—unless my back is against the wall. You can sell tech inside and work. If times are feeling kind of tough, and they gotta you got to make some move. [yes] Technology is often a pretty good answer.

RZ Now, look, I’m generalizing pretty grossly here, but it turns out that everyone dreams. Even the person that just does the security patches and buys the right CRM, also dreams. Everyone dreams. The challenge you have is you have a career and a professional reputation that you also are going to be guarded against. So it’s great to dream, right? But you really don’t want to roll the dice too much here, right? So how do you get the CEO and the CFO—I don’t know if there’s anything more tragic than pitching a forward thinking tech initiative to a CFO.

08:20 

PF Ahhhh—well, hold on—

RZ Well, there are other things more tragic. It’s been a difficult year—

PF There really are. 

RZ Lebanon’s going through a hard time. There are things more tragic. But when a CFO—

PF Well, hold on, let’s back that out. Look, I actually think there’s a cultural challenge here, which is: why? Why is it so hard for technology to actually point to the revenue and say, ”If we make this we’re gonna make this.” Like why is it so challenging for the technology SVP to stand in front of the CFO and say, ”I see opportunity here.”

RZ You ever see those shitty tech concept videos where the person touches the screen and it has like a water ripple effect?

PF Ohhh, there is one, [Rich laughs] there’s one from the 90s where Sun Microsystems, it’s like, it’s a woman putting together an ad for a sports car. And it’s a lot of her getting the big account going like, ”Yeah!!!”

RZ A lot of like virtual reality. To answer your question, here’s why. Because when you walk into the CFOs office, you’re essentially climbing into a box inside of a table in Microsoft Excel. You’re literally in the cell, you’re in the cell. And that’s how he sees you. And above you, there’s another cell, because that was the meeting before and that was for the holiday party. [Rich laughs]

PF This happens to us a lot where you’re working inside of a really big org, and you’ll pitch your whole thing and you’ll work with them on it, and they’ll go—and let’s say the project is called Project Cube. [yup] And the CFO will see it on the spreadsheet and go, ”Well, we already have another Project Cube?” And they’ll be like, ”Well, that one’s actually about like forestry.” [yeah] ”This one’s, this one’s a web app.”

09:53 

RZ They’re looking for patterns! Look, what do CFOs fear? Waste, excess. And now you’re coming to them in the you’re saying, ”Look, when someone wants to buy a breakfast nook, they need to see what it’s gonna look like in their kitchen, on their phone!” [yeah] ”And I need $3 million for that!”

PF Well, and you know, the problem is everyone who’s come before. Because you can say ”I can make you $20 million.” And everyone who’s come before has also said that. [yes] You know, one of the things that people don’t realize, if you work in a big tech company and you’re Product, they say to you, ”Here’s your run rate, here’s the number of months and we’d like to see a return.” And you have this giant platform in front of you. And you say, ”I’m gonna build this product, and we’re gonna see this money.” And they’re like, ”Great, as long as it’s $2 million a month, we can get started.” Or $20 million a month, or $200 million a month, depending on on sort of the scale of the company and how much money you’re making. [yeah] And so like, there is a real system and a real way of validating and understanding that and sort of like, [yes] and you’re building on top of a framework that already prints money when you’re at a giant tech company. And so a lot of times they hire dreamers from that world, [mhmm] and they drop them into, what could conservatively be described as, like a legacy shit show. There’s no platform. [right] There’s no engine for money making based on technology. [correct] And they have to figure out how to glue their old world into the new one. And the CFO just sits there and goes, ”What? What are you doing?”

RZ Exactly. And that’s why—I mean look, it’s flawed, to pitch tech vision to a CFO is flawed. Like the very top of the company needs to view any tech initiative as integral to like, not only success of the business, but potentially transformational. If they don’t see it that way, they’re always going to be skeptical. And this leads me to my next point, there is nothing sadder than the Innovation Group at company X. 

PF Ohhh. [Paul signs] I love the innovation group. 

RZ It’s low risk—you know, you know, when you buy a little kid or pretend steering wheel, so they can sit in the car with you and feel like they’re driving, [mhmm] but they actually have no control over the actual—

PF I’ve done a lot of thinking about these—because, you know, I’ve been connected to them at different times in my career and met a lot of people from them. You know my theory of the Innovation Group?

11:56 

RZ What is the Innovation Group? Very often companies decide—let’s describe it—that they need to invest.

PF Or the lab. The lab. 

RZ Yes, the lab. Even worse. They need to invest in the future. [mhm] And they have to write that off as, ”Look, I know I’m gambling a bit here. So I’m not going to put any real expectations on this. I’m going to stand up a group. So you don’t muck up the actual business. I’m going to put you over in this wing.” Right? And they let them have like PlayStation4, and they let them have like good snacks.

PF That’s right. So beanbag chairs—and the goal is that you know, you’re going to see patterns for the future the business. Now, eee, this is tricky because an R&D driven organization like say, IBM, has generated billions of dollars of value from their research. [mhm!] Hundreds of billions. [sure] Microsoft R&D is fantastic. Apply R&D is—

RZ Right but these are software companies first. These are first and foremost software companies. When a bank stands up an innovation lab…

PF Ugh. [Paul sighs] Well, okay, look, [Rich laughs] there are there are patterns that have worked that I’ve seen. No, no. I mean, you’re—if you have actual business ideas that can be tested, and you can build them and look for efficiencies, as you use your scale, there’s lots of good things you can do. [yes] But if your idea is, ”We’re gonna make a floor of the office, like a startup.” [mhm] Okay, so fine, lots of ideas will come out, and they’ll be some cool presentations. And maybe it won’t go anywhere, maybe it won’t. But everybody feels like they’ve done something. I really think the reason these fail is that a lot of the time is they don’t put anyone of real power in charge of them, right? Like they’re very non threatening.

RZ They don’t empower, right? And the truth is, ultimately, to really test these things out, you’re going to need to take them out of the sandbox and then put them in the real world. You’re going to need to really take some risk. Like if you’re just gonna, if you want to give some kids some toy blocks to play and not worry about it, good for you. Like, let’s just call it for what it is, right? 

13:50 

PF Let’s describe the real pattern, which is we create the Innovation Group and then people for about a year, maybe two, they do some work that you know, points to what your competitors are doing or how you you might do it using the internal platforms. They meet bureaucratic resistance, because the head of the labs is rarely someone who’s a good operator. Now we’re at a wall. Well, what really happens is it’s time to review and we wind down the Innovation Group or put it on a little task where it can do less harm. And then we go out, and we take what we learned and we buy the exact same thing in the form of another company that’s already got, [yeah] you know, a couple customers. And we fold it in and maybe that’s a disaster too, or maybe not. It’s the same set of patterns. And it’s more about, ”Can I culturally land these new ideas into the platform that already exists with this company?” And this is why—people look at, what is what is tech really do, is it has a platform that can actually allow those innovations to grow organically. And I’ll give you a concrete example, which is like AWS, right? So AWS comes out of Amazon’s actual experience with building lots of digital products. [yup] It was very cheap and very easy to innovate and create both new AWS products and new experiences inside of Amazon [yup] because their infrastructure was so big and powerful. [right] And so like, Amazon has this platform that makes innovation really easy. And then what happens is people say, ”Oh my God, we need to have an innovation culture like Amazon. And we’ll do small teams and two pizzas, and everybody will communicate by memo.” But what they missed is that the giant infrastructural like multi trillion dollar platform that everybody is building on top of doesn’t exist at their org, or if it does, it has 8 million gatekeepers who won’t let you use it. You know, Microsoft has windows, it’s easy to innovate on top of Window. 

RZ You’re using—I mean, Amazon might be the ultimate example of an organization that culturally thinks software has enormous latent power.

PF Everything’s in API, right? Like you don’t—no coordination, go to town.

15:52

RZ That’s right. Versus, Walmart has made enormous headway in their technology strategy.  [mhm] Enormous headway. I think the only reason there has been that kind of investment and sort of political backing is because of Amazon. Like it was an existential threat. It was like, ”Okay, this is it, we’re dead, or it’s $2 billion shifting over towards software.” Right?

PF I mean, two big, wonderful organizations that really do deserve each other. [Rich laughs] But Walmart in particular, is still a retailer. It’s a retailer with an effective digital arm, right? [correct] Oh, Amazon is a platform that happens to have a transactional layer that can move goods around in space. [yes] If it decided that the future was drone delivery, or that it didn’t want to sell physical goods anymore, it basically could do that. Walmart doesn’t have that option. You see the same with FinTech or you see what publishing or whatever, where it’s just like—and what would it take to compete? Well, it would take a CTO who would actually say, ”I need 10 years to get us to a serious platform and we’ll never really be at parity with the tech giants because we won’t have that motivation, and it could fail it any moment.” So what are you—what are you going to do? [Paul chuckles] What are you going to do? If you’re the CFO?

RZ I mean to close this out, I think you can’t be either of those things exclusively. I think if you’re a dreamer, then you’re like, ”Oh my god, here he comes again, asking for more money so he can try the new thing.” Right? I think if you’re a detente stakeholder, you’re just going to be someone that, ”Hey, look might be necessary, but isn’t going to make transformational change happen.” Because you’re not wired that way. The truth is, the really good dreamers are also thoughtful about stability. And they are someone you rely on for that those pragmatic decisions along the way. Eventually, business has to step up and accept that they have to make those investments to really thrive, like it’s just a reality.

17:47 

PF Well…this is what’s tricky, right? The most valuable people are in the team are the ones you can’t convince. [yeah, right] [Paul chuckles] Right? This is, this is really hard, right? You need people you can’t convince. You need balance and you need like that detente stakeholder and you need that dreamer to actually be partnered up. [mhmm] To make it work. [yes] I mean, we have that. You and I, you know, we were talking about that right before this call, like we have good—you are our operator and I bring a tremendous amount of chaos and insight, right, but it’s a really good combo because those two things—if you’re gonna put us together, [yeah] you’ve got a lot of detente focus, and I’ve got a lot of dreaming. [yeah] And you put us together and we’re actually able to look at things in—you know, you’ve taught me to stop fooling myself about how things are going to go great. And I think I’ve like helped you see the just the true weirdness of the world that we’re in and it really is killer. [yeah] It’s killer when you put those two things together.

RZ And, but we’re, we’re fortunate also because this is our own creation. And we are not inside of the big org.

PF Also we love tech and platforms. We just love them.

RZ Yes, we do. We love that latent, the latent possibility. Absolutely, right? And the truth is, I don’t have to go ask for permission or budget to go try a thing, right. Postlight Labs is a wonderful example of us encouraging that kind play.

PF Or just be interested in a thing.

RZ Yes, exactly, exactly. I want to close this with a final point here. [alright] And it’s, I’m gonna, I want to call it the ‘moment of enlightenment’. [okay] What I mean by that, is this, that C-suite that has been resisting the big leap for the longest time, eventually reality catches up with them. And there is this glorious moment, it is a moment of enlightenment, where that dreamer stakeholder or detente stakeholder, whoever you want to call it, is going to be given that green light. And when you’re given that, it’s like, you know what, this is ridiculous. It is time, it is time to not Band-Aid this anymore. It’s time to make the big investment. And my advice to that stakeholder or stakeholders is that when you have that moment in time, ask for everything.

PF Yeah, you know, no, no, this is, this is real, right? Because what happens is, they’re so used to just begging. [Paul chuckles]

19:58 

RZ Exactly! And—

PF That they keep begging. And instead of saying like, ”Well, if we’re gonna do it, it’s gonna hurt.” You gotta look them in the eye and say, ”It’s gonna hurt.”

RZ Also you do not want to come back six months later, Paul Ford, and ask for more money.

PF No, this is what—it always happens. I’ve seen it so many times they come back and they say, ”It actually turns out that was much harder.” At which point everyone else around the table, like a witch’s coven, [yeah] is just like ”I told you!” [Rich laughs] ”Further down the cauldron of failure we go!”

RZ Look, we at Postlight, offer partners with stakeholders, and we help them make the case, in fact. We help them—I call it ‘softening the target’, which I’ve been told is a very insensitive thing to say, but, regardless what I mean by that, and there’s probably a better way to say it is, you’re not going to sell this in one meeting. You need to little by little, essentially weaken their position and actually strengthen their confidence at the same time, that this move you’re, you’re asking them to make it is a meaningful one and one worth money and one, and it’s actually going to be a little more expensive than you thought. 

PF Flip it around. You gotta, you gotta—let’s put it in everybody’s language who’s sitting on the other side of the table. ”We are creating tremendous risk by not pursuing this right now. And let me tell you why.” That’s the start. [yup] It’s not, ”Oh my God, let me build you a good website and the gravy boat will spill over, and gravy will flow everywhere.”

RZ That’s right. 

PF It is that, ”Because of the competitive landscape we’re in and because of the actions of very large players, we are many years behind and I know if you can’t see the risk, I can, to the point that I don’t know how exactly we’re going to dig out but we’re starting now because otherwise the risk is too great. And it frankly will end up existential just like it did little companies like Walmart.”

RZ And let’s close it with an example. [okay] Let me only tell you what Bob Iger didn’t do, when Disney+ was coming together. You know what he didn’t do? He didn’t say, ”Get this done for me in less than 5 million bucks, for less than 5 million bucks.” [Paul chuckles] [no] He did not do that.

PF No he didn’t.

21:59 

RZ He did not do that, right? And look, Disney is not a technology company. Software is secondary.

PF Well, no, hold on. They own a lot of technology companies. 

RZ They do. But…yes this is true. 

PF No, no, but they actually had, they had the MLB streaming platform. And so that that’s a huge leap right there.

RZ Yeah, but they own Hulu, which until recently [Paul laughs] was a technology crime against humanity.

PF I wouldn’t call Hulu a technology company. [Rich laughs] I don’t know what I would call it. 

RZ My point is, it’s like, look, don’t screw this up, whatever it is going to take. From a scale perspective, from a usability perspective. The truth is, right out of the gate, I still don’t know how to play the next episode on the HBO app. I really don’t. To this moment, like I have to navigate out and up and left to go back to the next episode. But Disney got it right. And there’s always room for improvement. 

PF Well no, but no, actually, but let’s be, let’s be mindful. Disney’s actual launch was a debacle because no one could get to it. Remember, that was actually there was too much demand. But then about a week in—[yeah] So first of all, the week can be a disaster, week two, you got it in there and you’re like, ”Oh, there’s Star Wars. That’s cool. I can get all the—oh, alright, well…” And then that was it! And you’re like, ”Oh!” The beautiful thing about Disney+, is it didn’t require you to do any thinking to understand what the hell it was. I go into Hulu, I don’t know what’s on there.

RZ There’s a new version that’s out. And actually Hulu is put out some good content. Ramy is one of my favorite shows. It’s very funny. 

PF No, I mean, What We Do In The Shadows. But I mean, it’s like, you know, and now I’ve got HBO Max. I don’t even know how to log into it, or where to find it.

23:29 

RZ The HBO app was always sort of form over function for a very long time. It looked like I was inside of one of their ads and I was trying to find my way around. It was a rough scene. Point is businesses need business cases to make the big bets. How do you as a stakeholder, get the C-suite to commit to the big bet every so often? And you do that—sometimes it’s existential, sometimes like, ”Well, if we don’t do this, we’re dead.” Right? That’s the easier one. The more complex one, the harder one is, ”Stop feeding the wrong animals, and let’s make investment in the right path. And that’s going to take time.” Because investment is not what a business is for. If a business is selling cheap furniture online, that the pitch of like the ”Look, this is is gonna pay off in three years” is not that interesting to them from a technology investment perspective. So how do you get them there? Right? And the truth is you get them there, through gaining credibility and goodwill over time. And then eventually, you go in for that kill and say, ”Look, yes, this is about a forward looking plan.” We just finished a huge project with the MTA that really was investment. It’s 80% investment, 20% near term value, but the right people saw the vision and they got behind it. And the truth is, it’s going to reap rewards way beyond what happened this year, or last year, or when we launched it, but that takes a lot, right? And so how do you get that case put forward, right? How do you make that case so that people commit to that dream? I mean, I say dream as if it’s fantasy, but it’s really not it’s actually normal course of business. 

PF The road to quality is a very, very narrow road. [Paul chuckles]

RZ It is! 

PF It just gets narrower and narrower. It’s hard. It’s hard. This part’s really hard. I mean, look, there are ways to make strong cases, there are. But call us, frankly, I don’t even want to do the hardcore marketing pitch here. But like, if you need to make a strong case for your big thing, and your big org, just call us and Richard will talk to you for half hour, for free, you’ll lose a lot of pain.

RZ This is very unconventional marketing, but I like what you’re offering up here, Paul For. Use the coupon code, make the case. 

PF Ziade25, you know. [Rich laughs] No, this is real, this is real because the parameters are—like that deck has to look and behave a certain way and you might even know how it behaves but like, there are patterns and trends and ways to use existing big platforms out in the world that are going to cut millions and millions of dollars off of what you need to spend in order to achieve big goals. And there are 8 billion vendors out there who are going to get that those millions out because they know they can. Right. So, it’s a funny thing because you actually don’t get better returns by spending more, you got to be really careful.

26:15 

RZ Yes, this isn’t about that, right? It’s really more about, ”I’m going to ask you to put a little money aside in an unconventional way.” Look, let’s call this for what it is, let’s close it on this note, most non technical people view software as IT services, as IT, as this sort of cost center that sits next to HR and finance, right? [Paul signs] And that’s changing, that is really changing. [outro music fades in] And you know, the whole digital transformation mindset is causing that change. But that’s the case. So it takes a lot of work.

PF And I mean, we got to go, but it’s even worse, because what’s happening is there’s the software from 20 years ago, there’s no software which is impossible. You can’t run a business without tech.

RZ Yeah, something. 

PF Then there’s the software from 20 years ago, which a lot of people are still catching up with. And then there’s like the last five years, which is pretty transformative. You know, so it’s like you now layers in, and everyone’s like, ”Well we already did the big transformation.” [yeah] ”What did I spend all that money for?” And you’re like, ”Ahhhh…”

RZ That’s tough, right? Climbing out of that, which is like just—gosh!

PF Because then SAP comes in and says ”We’ve got a website, you know, framework toolkit builder, and it’s all in Java, why would you ever go and use you know, WordPress?” [yup] And everyone’s losing their brains. I mean, it’s—anyway, look, if people want to get in touch, what should they do, Rich? 

RZ They should check out Postlight.com. Lots of good case studies there around the work we’ve done and reach out to us hello@postlight.com. Coupon code—

PF Ziade25!

RZ So reach out hello@postlight.com. Also wrote an article about this, Paul. You can check it out at Postlight.com/insights.

PF It’s one of my favorite websites. Where I go for a lot of news. Alright, friends.

RZ Have a lovely week!

PF Let’s back to work. Bye! [music ramps up, plays alone for 3 seconds, ends]