So Ideal Scale, please share with me a little bit about your business.
Sure. So Ideal Scale is a business that's been around 15 years.
We are the largest innovation software company on the planet.
Our customers include major organizations like Pfizer, Comcast, US Post, etc.
And what our software does is it helps
these large complex organizations innovate faster, better and more systematically.
OK, OK. And you said it's been around for 15 years.
Yeah. So I'm not the founder.
I'm a professional CEO that was brought in.
But yeah, we've been around 15 years.
We're in seven countries now and continuing to grow.
OK, so you are the CEO.
And how long have you been the CEO?
Two years. I was hired from another company a couple of years ago.
All right. Do me a favor.
Just tell me about your journey, because I see that you're still in the corporate
world and you got to a big place.
So I'd love to hear about it.
Yeah.
And so my quick background is grew up in a mix of Canada and India.
Went to Dartmouth for undergraduate business school at Harvard.
I spent the first 10 years of my career on Wall Street as a professional investor
doing private equity deals and stock transactions.
And then for the last four or five years, I have been a professional CEO.
So either private equity firms or
entrepreneurs who are ready to retire hire me to run their businesses for them
and help take that business to the next stage of growth.
OK, OK.
And you said that so clear and concise.
I love that.
One thing about the transition that you're making.
And of course, we speak to often mostly
entrepreneurs, business owners, book writers, authors, all that.
However, with your journey, what keeps you in this field of CEO?
And and and then what made the move to ideal scale?
What was that move like?
Sure. So what I what motivates me in life and gets me up in the morning
professionally is building something and making a difference.
And I don't mean making a difference in a fuzzy, like, you know, save the world type
thing, but I like knowing that I created jobs or that I made an impact in my tiny
little community doesn't have to be going changing the world.
I like knowing that I mattered.
And at ideal scale, I get that feeling every day.
Right. I get to create jobs.
The average tech company has fired 30 percent of their employees in the last two
years. We've grown 30 percent.
So I feel really good that my employees have jobs.
They get to pay for their families, their homes, whatever.
I like that I get to create our product, actually creates a lot of value for our
customers. I could see that every day.
They get to develop cool ideas with our software.
They become better companies, better
government organizations, Doctors Without Borders uses us.
So we make a difference like our product makes a difference in the world.
And what drew me to Ideascale specifically was two things.
Number one, it was a tremendous professional opportunity.
Right. When you are reasonably young and someone gives you a call to be CEO of a
successful company, that's an awesome career opportunity for me personally.
But then secondly, what Ideascale does, its product is something I really believe
in because it flips the entire idea of whose ideas matter in a big
organization. It's the boss's ideas that matter.
No one cares about the junior guys or the girl in the side light office.
Our software makes it so that the best ideas win, no matter if they're from
someone on the other side of the world or someone very junior or someone who looks
a little bit different, best ideas win rather than loudest voices.
Yes, absolutely.
And I love that ending.
The best idea wins rather than the loudest voices.
And you're correct.
It's interesting how you have such passion behind it.
And as a leader and CEO, what do you find that you add to your company that keeps
the employees and it keeps it growing?
Sure. So as I think about my strengths and weaknesses,
I think that there's two areas where I'm truly world class or really, really good
at. Number one is given my finance background, I understand how businesses work,
whether it be a hardware store or pharmaceutical company.
I understand how businesses, all the pieces fit together, how it makes money,
how it generates profits.
And you obviously need profits in order to be able to pay your employees to build
a product to your customer or whatever. Right.
That's number one. I understand how businesses work really well.
Number two is I think I'm one of the rare
individuals that has worked in almost every part of a business.
I've worked in HR and finance and sales and marketing and operations and technology.
And so I understand how all these pieces
fit together rather than thinking of certain departments as subordinated to
other departments. I think that's a mistake a lot of business leaders make.
It's
I love you here to hear about your strengths.
And one of the things that I think about as you talk about your career and your
journey is in my eyes and I'm sure a lot of other people, you would be considered
successful when you say that you're young. May I ask just really quick,
how old you are, Bill? I'm 37.
Nice, nice.
So there's one question I'm going to put on here for you, because in our eyes,
I would say you're successful.
But what is success to you?
Sure. Success to me is so I don't think about whether I'm successful or not,
thankfully, you know, I mean,
I would define success as
every day or every week do I wake up and have felt that I made a difference
somewhat to someone, right? That could be my family life.
That could be in my professional life, in my in my company life.
Hey, did I keep people employed every week?
So like last year, which was a very tough year for the software industry,
I defined it as successful because we didn't fire people.
We hired people. And that made me feel successful.
If I continue to do that this year,
next year, then I'll then I'll feel pretty happy about myself.
And I get that, like you said, you know, to they let go of a lot of people.
I feel like everywhere was a layoff or or a change in business and everything.
I think that could happen there after the pandemic did happen.
And then for you guys to continue to keep hiring and you were the CEO of that,
I think that that's amazing.
One thing that I found in corporate business is
leaders such as yourself.
I am just going to be honest.
I expected you to have all the answers.
So how do you do when someone expects for you to have all the answers?
Well, I don't think at an idea scale,
at least no one expects me to have all the answers on everything.
There's areas where I'm less strong or not an expert.
Right. So I know nothing about
making things look beautiful, for example.
So when somebody asks my advice on how this page should look,
my response is often, you're the expert.
Why are you asking me? Right.
Like one of my design guys often ask me for my feedback.
And I'm like, you're you're the best in class at our company at this.
Why are you asking me? I do not have a high for design.
So I think at idea scale, people don't expect me to have all the answers.
And I am very honest when I have an area of expertise.
I'll offer an opinion.
If I don't know something, I will either say, hey, I don't know.
Go ask someone else or I will go research it and say, like, hey,
here's what Wikipedia says or here's what Chachi says or here's
what somebody else really smart says.
Yeah. And that's so funny because I remember starting in the corporate field.
I would go in there and I'm like, well, why don't they know that?
Why don't you know that you're supposed to know everything?
And as I sit here and I speak to so many guests in many different areas,
they the challenge not that they face, but as they coach and help other businesses
is the fact that CEOs and people in very high positions are often said to have a
a an idea of thinking that they they should know everything.
Right. And then that's why they're in coaching and everything.
So it's something that I had to ask you because I'm like, what in the world?
But I believed that when I was in the corporate world as well.
So as you are where you are now,
what is your vision for your next year or two years?
Sure. So on my in my personal life, I'm about to have my first kid in a few weeks.
So that's going to be take up a huge portion of my life.
And that's going to affect my vision in my life.
In my professional life, I think idea
skills that are really, really cool pointed in its trajectory.
So number one, we're we started expanding globally earlier this year.
We went from really an America based company to now we're in seven countries.
And we're hoping to continue to do that over the next couple of years.
That's a big change.
Number one. And that feels really good to have employees now in Mexico and Brazil
and South Africa and India.
And number two is our products.
We I think historically we were one product company that we had the best in class
idea management solution over the past year.
We've added whiteboarding.
And over the past over the next few months, we are actually going to be
releasing a whole bunch of new modules so that we can help our customers solve
all of their innovation problems and be the one stop shop for everything
innovation related. OK, and I will not sit here and tell you
that I know a lot about that, however, I'm very familiar with with the whiteboard
and and the innovation part.
I did see your quote speaking about being innovative.
And if you're not innovative, you're obsolete and and not wanting to become
obsolete. And so so many business are are trying to thrive.
We've seen several business here in San
Antonio, Texas, that were really big before the pandemic that just didn't thrive.
How do you believe that ideal scale thrived during the pandemic?
Sure.
To so firstly, I just want to reiterate
the quote you said, because I don't want to make sure your audience doesn't miss it,
which is if you're not innovating, just remember that your competitors are right.
You if you don't innovate, you become obsolete.
It might happen tomorrow.
It might take a year, might take five years, but eventually you're gone.
That happens to the biggest of us. Right.
Intel's facing that that was the biggest
semiconductor chip company in the world for the last 60 years.
And they are just being decimated right now
because they did not remain as innovative as some of their peers.
For Ideascale during the pandemic, I actually was not at Ideascale.
Then because I go in recently recently.
So I would say that, look, we were already a remote first organization even before
COVID, so I don't think COVID disrupted our operations as much as it did other
businesses at the time when COVID was happening.
I was actually running a trucking business
that was far, far more effective because that was real people in warehouses,
in trucks, driving essential goods around the country.
And we had to keep running because obviously people still needed food.
They still needed toilet paper.
They still needed the real necessities of life.
And you can't do that with, you know, software.
Yes, yes, yes.
And I say that because, again, it's Ideascale can't run without people.
And then I know you weren't here, but you made the decision to come to Ideascale.
So I know within that offer, there was like you had to have some type of
information and some type of idea as to why you would want to take this position
and such a big position with a company that may not have been.
And I appreciate you sharing that information with me.
As you continue on and you move forward in all of this, how do you plan on
continuing the growth in Ideascale?
And I know that things are being made in order to make the company
be one of the best companies to choose from.
But there's still going to be some growth.
So once you get to that point, where do you go to then?
Sure.
So the beautiful part of our space is two things.
I'm going to brag a little bit.
We are by far the best rated solution in our software area.
Right. If you go to any of the Yelp for software sites, we're the best.
No one doubts that.
They love our software.
They love our customer service.
So that's number one.
Number two is I'm in the fortunate place
where this is still a nascent or young area.
It's not like somebody already owns the software.
If you go to, you know, if you need an email address, you basically go to Gmail,
Hotmail or Yahoo, right?
That space is dominated.
No one's starting up another email company anytime soon because Google or Yahoo
or Yandex or those guys have won that space.
In our space, it turns out most of my customers, they don't have any software solution.
I'm often competing against like physical
post-it notes from 3M or Excel spreadsheets.
So I have a lot of room to grow.
And the great thing is a lot of my customers are realizing more and more.
So, hey, they need real innovation software, not a piece of paper in a pen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's.
Don't get me wrong, I still write notes.
But notes are a great way for short term things.
They're not great as an individual.
They're terrible if you want to share those notes with thousands of people.
That's cool.
Like paper is not a collaborative effort.
Paper is a personal effort, right?
Absolutely. And it's so funny.
When you said that, I looked down, I was like, yeah, I wrote a whole bunch of notes
on something that actually need to get somewhere and go somewhere.
I want to make sure that I address that you're about to have a baby.
Congratulations.
Thank you. This is this is this is my office right now,
but it's quickly becoming a nursery.
May I ask what you're having?
I don't know yet.
I've asked not to be told.
So my wife knows. But, you know, look, it doesn't matter to me whether it's a boy
or girl, I'm going to love them equally as much.
So I've asked not to be told.
I won't know until the day of what I know.
That's super exciting and very different.
I love the color in that room.
It's very pretty.
And so, yeah, no, no more office.
So it sounds like you'll be going to the garage,
the garage, the the
the living room, maybe a co-work, we workspace.
There's a Capital One cafe nearby that I really like.
Yeah, yes.
It's just like you said, your vision is going to change.
And I think it's going to change a lot.
Yeah, exactly. You asked what I've personally I have no idea.
I've never had a kid before.
And so I don't even have a vision for what the next year or two is going to look
like, because it's going to be way crazier than anything I can imagine.
I tell you.
So personally, I have four of them, 29, 24, 14 and 10.
So with that being said, every child, every span, every life, every year
changes the vision.
I don't I tell you, sometimes I'm like, do I still have a vision?
Or is it just the vision to go clean the kitchen
behind the kids?
Hey, it's good.
And I'm super excited for you.
I do have another question.
What is the reason for you choosing to do a podcast?
Sure. I think there's two areas.
Number two reasons.
Number one is I think I, my personally and Ideascale as a company,
have some really good thoughts on how people as individuals or large
organizations can become more innovative.
And I'm trying to share those thoughts.
The biggest, the most important thought
that I'm trying to share is that the idea meritocracies are really important
for healthy, innovative organizations.
If you don't, if you let the loudest voices win rather than the best ideas,
your organization is doomed to failure over the long run.
The second is, is to just make sure that people are aware that my software is
entirely free if you're less than 100 people.
So for your audience as entrepreneurs or small businesses,
if you're less than 100 people, our software is completely free.
Just go to Ideascale.com, click Get Started Free.
Takes 30 seconds to sign up.
No downloads. It's entirely on the web.
Obviously, if you're a larger organization, I would love if you come to us as a
customer, but we really want to make sure we want to support the global ecosystem.
We want to support small businesses,
individual entrepreneurs who are constantly innovating and starting new companies.
And so we want to be the innovation ecosystem for you guys as well.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.