Josh Broward: Hi everybody, welcome back to Founder Real Talk. I am your host, Josh Broward, CEO of Wisdom Partners. And we are doing this podcast because, well, as they would say in the Bay Area, it's hella hard to be a founder. And it doesn't help us make it any easier by pretending it's not hard and by only talking about the good stuff. So we are here to talk about the good and the bad, the great and the boring. And we have with us today David Aronchik. He has a background that's the Ivy League of the tech giants. Google, Amazon, Microsoft. I guess the only big one you're missing there is Apple. So get on that. And he is now the founder and CEO of Expanso, which is building infrastructure that lets organizations run compute where their data lives across cloud edge and on premises devices or on-prem environments. So David, without further ado, thanks for being here.
David Aronchick: Thank you, it's it's a pleasure.
Josh Broward: So help us understand the problem that you guys are solving. Why is it important to run compute where the data is? some of our listeners might not be tech founders. So what does it even mean to run compute? And then we can go to why it matters where you do it.
David Aronchick: Yeah, I mean, so it kind of goes back to first principles on this stuff, right? rather than talking about compute at all, which which I think can get kind of distracting, the the most important thing is first to start with what you're doing. and what you're doing right now is you're generating information about your business in a whole bunch of locations. For as much as people think stuff is being generated in the cloud, it's not, right? It's being generated in warehouses and industries and vehicles and you know bank teller machines and you name it, supermarket aisles. the the data is being created where humans, where physical world is.
Josh Broward: Thank
David Aronchick: today the standard is to take quote unquote take all that data and ship it to to a data warehouse that might be somewhere off. like I said in the cloud. but that motion is not ideal because it costs a real risk or it adds risks and it costs real money and time.
Josh Broward: Okay.
David Aronchick: it could be because your network is flow, lots of things are connected via whatever a cable modem or you know 5G internet or something like that. It could be just Time-based, moving data doesn't happen instantaneously. We'd all love it if it did, but it doesn't. it could be regulation, right? If I I take data that's that's created in in New York or Paris or Tokyo and move it to Oregon, I may be at risk from HIPAA or GDPR or PCI compliance or anything, any of the many, many, many regulations that are out there. and so an alternative way to approach this stuff is, hey, you know what? Before I move all the data, are there some actions I can take to reduce the things that are painful here? The things that are costly, the things that take time, the things that put me at legal risk. yes, of course there are, but it's oftentimes hard to manage, hard to decide what those are, hard to update and manage those things as they're happening out there. and and that's what we do. We provide you a platform that makes it very easy for you to according to whatever your business requirements are, run those things out there. the analogy that I like to give to a lot of people out there who are not technical or or curious about how this impacts them is imagine you've got a mine. let's say you have ten mines, okay? And those mines are spread across, I don't know, the the central part of the US. and you have a refinery, you know, in whatever, Atlanta. You say, you know what, I'd like to mine all that property that I have out there and collect gold, see if there's any gold in it. So you know, the way we are acting with data today is we're taking that data, we're taking the raw dirt and we're putting it in the back of a dump truck and we're driving it raw to Atlanta and then we're beginning to process it. Right? Which not ideal. it means you're moving a lot of stuff that you knew you didn't need at all You know, to extend the analogy out to the nth degree. Maybe, I don't know, there's radioactive waste in the dirt or whatever, landfill, who knows? Like stuff that you're like, no, you actively don't want in that central mine, or central refinery. plus even if nothing's wrong with it, it's just a waste, right? Like one dump truck filled with you know, nine tons of dirt and, you know, half a kilogram of gold is moving a lot of stuff that you didn't really need, right? Wouldn't it be nice to tell every mine operator, hey everyone, run this little job where you're there. here's a filter sieve or something that cleans it up, that that takes doesn't get all the gold, doesn't get all the dirt out, but gets, I don't know, let's call it fifty percent of the dirt, wasted away, right? That's what we do. And then, to extend the analogy, what would it look like for you to communicate that to all those people, say, hey, you know what? I know the sieve holes were set at, half an inch, but let's set them to an inch, whatever it might be, so on and so forth. Those are instructions that you need to get out there. Let's say you didn't just want to look for gold, but we got a new process for look for copper as well. Here's the new instructions there. How do you monitor all this from a central location without someone having to call up every day and say, hey, you know, here's how much I collected and it's running and it's not running, so on and so forth? These are all, again, incredibly annoying problems that should be really easy to solve, but it turns out they're harder than you would think. And and really that's what we that's what we do. We in the in the data world, we do exactly that. We make it very, very easy for you to take that, run it, and and do all that goodness.
Josh Broward: So the compute is the refinery that actually makes something useful out of the raw data.
David Aronchick: In in this particular scenario, and I know it's a little bit contrived, the compute are the instructions that you're passing down. and in this contrived example, the sieve, for lack of a better term, right? It's the hey, here's the instructions for what you should do and the mechanism to do it. the refinery is compute today. Which i it's additional compute, but that's not what we focus on. We actually work with whatever you have already on your back end. we try very, very hard not to like ask you to like go and implement something new.
Josh Broward: And why does this problem in particular resonate with you?
David Aronchick: Well, you know, you mentioned those companies that I was working at previously, and it's certainly something that we did a lot internally. again, you know, lots of folks think about these companies as being spectacular, data heavy, efficient organizations, and they are, but the reason they are is because they've spent so much time getting it right. it takes a lot of work, you know, e even even if you have The sophistication of someone like Google and Microsoft and Amazon, how do you, when you're creating nine petabytes a day of log data, how do you move that around? It it it's it's not magical. You you can't you don't get that for free. so you have to do a lot of optimization around that. the thing that we were thinking is boy, wouldn't it be nice to let other people take some of the experience and optimization we've done around this. and do it themselves.
Josh Broward: What's a win for you and the Expanso team over the past year that makes you really proud?
David Aronchick: I mean it's you know the the challenge that we always have is is you know like I said earlier, the capability or the need here is is often so very, very large, but it's also very, very specific to a certain set of customers. You like I said, you kind of don't know you need this until you need it. and so that's oftentimes very large enterprises which take Quite a bit of time in order to get it right. you know, in the past year we've landed some very large customers, which took, you know, more than 12 months to land. and that's the kind of thing that just takes, you know, it can drain you every day, every week. my gosh, you know, I can't wait. We're gonna do this. we gotta add this one more person to these things. You know, we do a lot of work with energy and telco and this is an area where like I said, we landed some really big ones over the past year and was really exciting to see the value be so obvious that even they could overcome the organizational inertia.
Josh Broward: I'm curious, did you start with enterprise customers? What size was your kind of first batch of customer?
David Aronchick: we did because like I said, there's there's really you know I could go to the most sophisticated small business in the world and more likely than not they're just not gonna see the value in what we provide. again, we can give them value, but if you're not processing like I said, on the order of you know a 10 gigabytes a month or 100 gigabytes a month, it's just not gonna be that much. I, you know, I I wish I could say it was, but it's just not. And so as a result, we knew that we were gonna have to start with you know, pretty large enterprises before anything else happened.
Josh Broward: what was your process for finding a way in and navigating those systems. Unless maybe you had a unique in because of your own history, but I often tell founders if your first target, if your beachhead market is enterprises, you're more likely to starve before you catch the whale.
David Aronchick: Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And there's there's really that is the absolute truth. And and you know, you're very kind about my pedigree, but that doesn't really, differentiate you from Adam out here. the truth is that you know we didn't have an answer for you, and this just some of the biggest ones we want got were pure kismet. I wish I could have said that there was some, absolute path here, but it is the the challenge and one of the reasons why I'm excited to talk because you know it's very hard to overstate how hard it is to break through and go to market in with these folks.
Josh Broward: Yeah, I think founders often underestimate the role of timing and luck in the journey. And there for sure is an element of being prepared kind of gives you better luck.
David Aronchick: Yeah.
Josh Broward: And for sure, there's an element of doing your research to understand the timing and all of that stuff. So I don't want to overestimate it, but sometimes the difference between one company that makes it and one company that doesn't is who was in the coffee line behind them.
David Aronchick: Totally agreed. Totally, totally, totally agreed.
Josh Broward: So we talked about the high, know, landing some big name enterprise customers is a huge deal. Sometimes it nets you more revenue than the total investment you got. Not always, but sometimes. And that can be a little bit mind boggling and, you know, pop the champagne kind of a situation. But it's not all like that. So. Let's talk about some of the low spots. One thing we say often is wisdom is failure redeemed. So I wonder if you could share with us one way that you redeemed failure or struggle, like a hard thing you went through and a specific thing you learned from it.
David Aronchick: I mean, one was just the approach we initially took. We thought that cost, for example, would just be an instant winner. Just not even close. everyone cares about cost, everyone wants things to work properly, everyone wants to be efficient in the way that they spend, you know, all that stuff. And it just seems so obvious to me. Yet, when we started digging into it, it was much less compelling than people cared about. the right people didn't own the budget, the right people didn't care about you know where the the dollars were gonna be saved, so on and so forth. That was a really weird and kind of hard lesson. you know again just just real strange for me. And so it required a pretty big pivot around what we were doing for spend. and customer outreach. So yeah, I that that was a really big thing for me.
Josh Broward: What did you find that your customers really did care about? What moved the needle for them?
David Aronchick: It was much more about human being time. Were they being efficient? like could we help cut cost and so on? you know, so on and so forth. There there was a lot there.
Josh Broward: So less about cost of the technology and more about cost of human time.
David Aronchick: yeah, it was the you know, the amount that people were spending, saving money, saving energy, saving time, maintaining these things were far more important to them than the the work involved. you know, dollar savings. Again, just big surprise.
Josh Broward: That's really interesting. I've heard some people say executives only care about three things. Money, mission, and risk. It sounds like what you're describing is somewhere in between money and mission.
David Aronchick: Yeah, the the problem is that money is usually not a really compelling factor. That is what I've found. And by that I mean almost to a person, depending on who you're talking to in the organization, they don't care about money. You're like, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? There's effectively two people in the company that care, quote unquote, care about money, right? The CFO and the CEO. Outside of those two people, the majority of people are trying to get stuff done, trying to make sales, trying to do this, trying to do that. they have other tasks. And CEOs and CFOs care about those things because the savings returns to them. But for everyone else, savings is purely a tax. The money doesn't come back to them, the budget doesn't come back to them. If they go find something that's three times more efficient, you know, if they were doing an ad campaign and they were spending three hundred thousand dollars and then all of a sudden they found something that was three times more efficient, now they can do it for a hundred thousand dollars. It's more likely than not that that money is not gonna, you know, let them go hire another person. it's not gonna come bring them back. If you're really of a forward looking organization, sure, maybe they get an attaboy at the next quarterly meeting, but That's then that's gone. it just doesn't add to that person, that program manager's business to be more efficient. They're like, well, I don't care. The money came from somewhere. Now, that doesn't mean that they won't care if the CEO or the CFO says, hey everyone, you gotta cut costs or you're fired. Sure, then it's gonna work. But that's a top-down mandate and very different. For us
Josh Broward: Hmm.
David Aronchick: coming in and trying to sell to anyone who is not one of those first two people is gonna say, I mean, that's just dead in the water. They're like, hmm, don't care. you know, I don't have a mandate. or if they do, that mandate would already been there. And so it's up to us to find the people who do have those mandates. But more often than not, it's just it's just pretty surprising.
Josh Broward: So what moved the needle for them was time for them and their team.
David Aronchick: Exactly. Like they do have a person, they do have a hire. as that person are they able to take those people that they've hired and redeploy them to new things 'cause they're spending less time doing this other stuff.
Josh Broward: Interesting. yeah, I'm just going back to the framework I mentioned earlier, money, mission and risk. Maybe time is kind of the thread between all of those. What's the biggest challenge you're trying to solve right now?
David Aronchick: It's some category of awareness, I would say, or or some form of top of the funnel challenges. It's very difficult to overstate that. You know, it's a such a noisy space out there, and even though we do all this amazing technology and function and capability and skill and yada yada yada, it is really hard to overstate how tough it is to to rise above the noise. You know, that's something that would be a big winner for us. it is rare that it is the case that someone comes in the top of the funnel and we can't have a good conversation with the right people and they're like, that I clearly see where this is gonna be valuable. It's much bigger challenge for us to to find the way to have that conversation with as many people as possible so they can self select in.
Josh Broward: Who do you find are the right people in organizations for you to talk to? Is it the CTO or is it is your doorway in usually someone much further down the chain who is some sort of data manager or IT ops
David Aronchick: know, again, you're you're kinda touching on a a really important point. For us, if we go in too high, CTO, CEO, they're almost always like, Yeah, that sounds great, but let me get you the right person 'cause I'm not the right person. if we go in too low, they have no budget authority, they have no ability to make any decisions whatsoever. they're like, Again, sounds good, but you know, I don't know what to do. it really is that that middle ground that that's the key one where it's, you know, how do I Find someone in the middle who is interesting enough to be curious about potentially a new platform, knows the scope of the challenges that they have as an organization, and can spend the time thinking about it. you know, having flexibility around their their background or priority list or things like that. So really Goldilocks in the middle.
Josh Broward: So someone at perhaps the VP or director level.
David Aronchick: Exactly.
Josh Broward: Okay. And when you find that person, I'm thinking about my experience in enterprise. I'm guessing if you're talking to a VP, they're like, I'm interested. Let me hand you off to this person who's going to basically do due diligence. Like who's going to research your tech and see if this will matter for us. Is that
David Aronchick: Yeah, exact exactly.
Josh Broward: okay? And then they report back to the VP and then the VP has to decide, this worth taking? taking a beating on my back to bring this up to the executive vice president.
David Aronchick: Exactly.
Josh Broward: How do you convince that person to be your internal champion?
David Aronchick: again it's it's you know, they're already gonna have their backlog. They're already gonna have their priority list for for this, you know, quarter, year, whatever it might be. for us it's aligning ourselves with that and saying, Hey, whatever you got there, we're gonna do it faster.
Josh Broward: So you say we can help you accomplish the stuff you're already trying to accomplish just 20 % faster.
David Aronchick: Exactly.
Josh Broward: That's compelling because everybody is like they have a huge list and it does tend to be backlogged and they're thinking how, you know, they've got, most of them have some kind of scorecard that gets a red, yellow, green rating and they've got a bunch of greens that are really should be shaded yellow and a bunch of yellows, they're trying to figure out how to get them to turn green and... If you can say, if you can convincingly say you can increase their green rate, all of sudden that's... That's the kind of thing that gets promotions.
David Aronchick: Absolutely. And again, they're not gonna believe you. I mean that's the truth of it, right? They hear this from every vendor in the world and twice on Sunday. they are just constantly out there being assaulted with this. And their ability to detect, are you bullshitting? Are they like adding value? Are you like serious about what you're saying? yeah, that's basically it.
Josh Broward: How do you overcome their bullshit meter?
David Aronchick: Well, I mean that's that's the challenge. again,
Josh Broward: You
David Aronchick: I'm lucky. I have a good background. They're like, well, okay, you got some credibility here. that said, that only goes so far, there's still people who still people out there, with pedigrees like mine who who are bullshit. ideally you get to their data as quickly as you can, meaning into their observability flows that they trust. And then
Josh Broward: Hmm.
David Aronchick: and then you go from there. Meaning like, okay, hey, here's Data that I know about. This isn't just bullshit data. And the here's this, that, and the other. let me I'm gonna go use that and and then off I go. or I I trust that and now you're working on, modern data. let's use that.
Josh Broward: do you find that it's usually a stair step process, like a little pilot, then like a kind of a
David Aronchick: Yeah, always, always.
Josh Broward: medium, like then a serious pilot that like people will actually pay attention to. And then like maybe you take over the data for a department or one particular thing before you get access to the whole.
David Aronchick: Yep, absolutely.
Josh Broward: Okay, so here's a different kind of question. You've been around a while, you've done some stuff in big companies, How has that caused you to evolve as a leader?
David Aronchick: you know I've I've gone in and out across my career of well two times CTO, two times CEO. how does it change? I mean you know, big companies, the thing that's hidden about a big company, I mean they move slow, but they also have insane amount of muscle in order to achieve what you what you'd like. so you you have the ability to, you know, get an entire marketing department or leverage the credibility of someone like Google or whatever. I mean, there's just a million things that these folks are able to achieve that that you know take would take years for you to achieve externally. so that's the biggest difference. the next difference down is that you can move insanely fast. You can make a decision tomorrow and have it be implemented you know on Monday.
Josh Broward: What do you think is your growing edge as a leader?
David Aronchick: no, that's an interesting question. I mean, I guess I I think I'm pretty good at storytelling and and painting the larger vision. I'm very good at communicating externally to what people need and and helping them you know see where, you know, one plus one equals three. and yeah, that's probably the biggest thing.
Josh Broward: Where are you still trying to grow? What's an area that you feel like you still need to evolve as a leader?
David Aronchick: Got it. for me, I think there is an element of you know hiring quickly, even if it means potentially a misfit hire or a little bit more expensive than my comfortable with early on. I've been told, I've been taught for years and years a CEO that has two jobs. job number one, make sure the company doesn't run out of money, and job number two is set the vision. And and that really is it. I'm a startup guy though, and so I've done this, you for a lot of my career, and it's very easy for me to say, well, I could do that, right? here's this marketing campaign. You know what? I could do it, right? I'll save a couple bucks doing that. you know, it's just my weekend. And I don't care. I'm lucky enough to, you know, knock wood. I I'm not gonna say be burnout free, but certainly seem to be resistant to burnout. which is not healthy, but still. you know, and and there are lots and lots of people out there who sell a sweet song and say, you know what I have an incredible Rolodex and I worked here and here and I know exactly how to sell and I know how to do this and that. And then they come in and do absolutely nothing. And that doing nothing is the best case. You know, I've had people
Josh Broward: You
David Aronchick: come in who are just the most toxic people in the world. Like, so it's not just doing nothing. If they did nothing, I would I would kill for it. But instead they like, you know, sow internal descent and set bad direction and you know, lie about you externally and all that kind of stuff. So I mean it really adds up and it could take, months or years to recover from that kind of thing. but that said, there truly are, you know, the one constant in this universe is there are 168 hours in a week. And I don't care who you are. that's not changing. And a human being can only accomplish so much in a hundred and sixty eight hours. and so your ability to find more people to accomplish more stuff is critical. And and I think that is an area that I struggle with. I don't I don't struggle trusting people. I probably trust people too much. I struggle getting the people in efficiently.
Josh Broward: How are you investing in yourself and your own leadership, whether it's in this area of learning how to onboard the right people in the right ways or in other ways that you're trying to grow as a leader?
David Aronchick: my biggest investments are you know, certainly bring people into the decision making. decide how to invest, where to invest, how to flex, you know, other people's skills. make it clear that I'm relying on them, that like it is, you know, hey look, I'm handing this decision off to you. Help me. You know, I need you to take agency here so that I don't have to check in six times and make sure something gets over the c over the line. you know, that that's w some of the biggest stuff that I'm doing.
Josh Broward: Alright, cool. Well, let me turn it over to you to ask me a question.
David Aronchick: I mean you see so many different businesses out there, even before you engage, or maybe it's after you engage, what's the most common thing where you're like, look, man, you could have saved time and energy and money, doing this yourself, even before, we talked. And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to like dissuade you from being a client. But like, what could
Josh Broward: Yeah.
David Aronchick: you have done? What what what could people be doing today that they're not doing?
Josh Broward: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll say three things that might be counterintuitive. And I might, this is a, you know, off the cuff answer. tomorrow I might have a deeper answer. But one, at the risk of self-promotion, I think most people should hire a coach sooner. Hiring a coach often fits effectively into the luxury category for founders. They're like, yeah, I would love to have that. if only I had enough money and, what often happens is a coach saves money in the long run because you make better decisions. You procrastinate less because you get to clarity faster or you procrastinate less because There's a lot of other junk clouding the process and a coach can help you say, is this what you're really worried about? Okay, let's talk about that. And then once you talk about that, they're like, okay, I'm ready to go. And so that's one thing is just getting an outside voice in the discussion. A second thing I think most founders should do much sooner than they do is get an assistant. whether you call it a chief of staff or a virtual assistant or admin and use them as almost as an extension of yourself. So, okay, here's this task that'll take 30 minutes or an hour. And I can certainly do it, but I can spend 10 minutes explaining it. And my assistant can do most of the work in 40 minutes and then I spend 10 minutes polishing it and it's done. And so I just cut my time by two thirds. There are so many tasks like that. And I think people wait too long. Even just to hire a 10 hour a week assistant can be a significant boost for most founders.
David Aronchick: Mm.
Josh Broward: the third thing, this one might be the most counterintuitive, is take a full day off every week, which often fits in the luxury category. people think of it as a luxury. I'll slow down when we raise our Series A or whatever the thing is. After I hire a COO, it'll be okay for me to slow down. But even if you're burnout resistant, there's something about the constant movement and engagement. that doesn't enable us to recharge fully. So
David Aronchick: Mm
Josh Broward: it's as if our battery is always running at 70 % and we never get it up to full charge, which I know on a phone it doesn't really matter, but if the battery also includes like directly influences your performance output.
David Aronchick: Mm.
Josh Broward: So people, think way more people brown out than burn out.
David Aronchick: Very, very interesting. I mean I I agree with all those. interestingly, I I do have a part time assistant. And they're good, but I I feel like I'm grossly underusing them. So even just advice on how to use them better would be
Josh Broward: Sure, yeah, happy to. I think the two things that are... the two ways I work with my assistant most are... Using that 1080. I well, I don't think I described it right But if if you consider how much work something takes as a hundred percent if you do ten or twenty percent of the work and They do sixty or eighty percent of the work and then you do ten or twenty percent of the work that saves a ton of time so I'll often have my assistant create a one-pager or Draft an email to like I know it needs to be a long email. I like our newsletter that kind of thing. Or sometimes I'll even say, hey, I'm driving home from dropping my son off at swim. I have this idea about a blog post I want. I've been telling people all week this. Or I told somebody this for the third time this month, and then I'll just talk for five minutes and say, can you turn that into a blog post? And then he'll combine that voice message with AI and get me a post that's 90 % there and then I can go in and fine tune it and what ends up happening is the net cost for me is about 15 minutes versus at least an hour and because it's an hour I would keep putting it off. where this way it's something I can get done, I can squeeze it in between things and it's less emotionally heavy. So it increases
David Aronchick: Hm, fair thing.
Josh Broward: my productivity that way. The other one, I'm not currently doing this, but I think it's a great way to work with assistance is when you finish a call, talk into WhatsApp or whatever your voice memo thing is for two minutes and say, just had this call with David. We talked about ABC. These are the things that I need to do. These are the things he promised to do. Also, by the way, he told me his kid just won an art prize. So I want to send him that article I saw about Monet or whatever. Like I don't know, maybe it was an impressionist art thing. And then the VA puts all of that together and puts it in your draft file. And again, it's the 108010 rule. And it makes it so you can send way better follow-up messages in way less time. Because if you had to actually write all of that, I mean, your chances of doing it go way down. at least for me.
David Aronchick: Yeah, I could totally see that. Totally. well cool. I mean that that's great for me.
Josh Broward: Yeah, that's it. Thank you so much for being part of this, David. I appreciate your time and for sharing your journey.
David Aronchick: Course. Thank you.
David Aronchick: Thank you, it's it's a pleasure.
Josh Broward: So help us understand the problem that you guys are solving. Why is it important to run compute where the data is? some of our listeners might not be tech founders. So what does it even mean to run compute? And then we can go to why it matters where you do it.
David Aronchick: Yeah, I mean, so it kind of goes back to first principles on this stuff, right? rather than talking about compute at all, which which I think can get kind of distracting, the the most important thing is first to start with what you're doing. and what you're doing right now is you're generating information about your business in a whole bunch of locations. For as much as people think stuff is being generated in the cloud, it's not, right? It's being generated in warehouses and industries and vehicles and you know bank teller machines and you name it, supermarket aisles. the the data is being created where humans, where physical world is.
Josh Broward: Thank
David Aronchick: today the standard is to take quote unquote take all that data and ship it to to a data warehouse that might be somewhere off. like I said in the cloud. but that motion is not ideal because it costs a real risk or it adds risks and it costs real money and time.
Josh Broward: Okay.
David Aronchick: it could be because your network is flow, lots of things are connected via whatever a cable modem or you know 5G internet or something like that. It could be just Time-based, moving data doesn't happen instantaneously. We'd all love it if it did, but it doesn't. it could be regulation, right? If I I take data that's that's created in in New York or Paris or Tokyo and move it to Oregon, I may be at risk from HIPAA or GDPR or PCI compliance or anything, any of the many, many, many regulations that are out there. and so an alternative way to approach this stuff is, hey, you know what? Before I move all the data, are there some actions I can take to reduce the things that are painful here? The things that are costly, the things that take time, the things that put me at legal risk. yes, of course there are, but it's oftentimes hard to manage, hard to decide what those are, hard to update and manage those things as they're happening out there. and and that's what we do. We provide you a platform that makes it very easy for you to according to whatever your business requirements are, run those things out there. the analogy that I like to give to a lot of people out there who are not technical or or curious about how this impacts them is imagine you've got a mine. let's say you have ten mines, okay? And those mines are spread across, I don't know, the the central part of the US. and you have a refinery, you know, in whatever, Atlanta. You say, you know what, I'd like to mine all that property that I have out there and collect gold, see if there's any gold in it. So you know, the way we are acting with data today is we're taking that data, we're taking the raw dirt and we're putting it in the back of a dump truck and we're driving it raw to Atlanta and then we're beginning to process it. Right? Which not ideal. it means you're moving a lot of stuff that you knew you didn't need at all You know, to extend the analogy out to the nth degree. Maybe, I don't know, there's radioactive waste in the dirt or whatever, landfill, who knows? Like stuff that you're like, no, you actively don't want in that central mine, or central refinery. plus even if nothing's wrong with it, it's just a waste, right? Like one dump truck filled with you know, nine tons of dirt and, you know, half a kilogram of gold is moving a lot of stuff that you didn't really need, right? Wouldn't it be nice to tell every mine operator, hey everyone, run this little job where you're there. here's a filter sieve or something that cleans it up, that that takes doesn't get all the gold, doesn't get all the dirt out, but gets, I don't know, let's call it fifty percent of the dirt, wasted away, right? That's what we do. And then, to extend the analogy, what would it look like for you to communicate that to all those people, say, hey, you know what? I know the sieve holes were set at, half an inch, but let's set them to an inch, whatever it might be, so on and so forth. Those are instructions that you need to get out there. Let's say you didn't just want to look for gold, but we got a new process for look for copper as well. Here's the new instructions there. How do you monitor all this from a central location without someone having to call up every day and say, hey, you know, here's how much I collected and it's running and it's not running, so on and so forth? These are all, again, incredibly annoying problems that should be really easy to solve, but it turns out they're harder than you would think. And and really that's what we that's what we do. We in the in the data world, we do exactly that. We make it very, very easy for you to take that, run it, and and do all that goodness.
Josh Broward: So the compute is the refinery that actually makes something useful out of the raw data.
David Aronchick: In in this particular scenario, and I know it's a little bit contrived, the compute are the instructions that you're passing down. and in this contrived example, the sieve, for lack of a better term, right? It's the hey, here's the instructions for what you should do and the mechanism to do it. the refinery is compute today. Which i it's additional compute, but that's not what we focus on. We actually work with whatever you have already on your back end. we try very, very hard not to like ask you to like go and implement something new.
Josh Broward: And why does this problem in particular resonate with you?
David Aronchick: Well, you know, you mentioned those companies that I was working at previously, and it's certainly something that we did a lot internally. again, you know, lots of folks think about these companies as being spectacular, data heavy, efficient organizations, and they are, but the reason they are is because they've spent so much time getting it right. it takes a lot of work, you know, e even even if you have The sophistication of someone like Google and Microsoft and Amazon, how do you, when you're creating nine petabytes a day of log data, how do you move that around? It it it's it's not magical. You you can't you don't get that for free. so you have to do a lot of optimization around that. the thing that we were thinking is boy, wouldn't it be nice to let other people take some of the experience and optimization we've done around this. and do it themselves.
Josh Broward: What's a win for you and the Expanso team over the past year that makes you really proud?
David Aronchick: I mean it's you know the the challenge that we always have is is you know like I said earlier, the capability or the need here is is often so very, very large, but it's also very, very specific to a certain set of customers. You like I said, you kind of don't know you need this until you need it. and so that's oftentimes very large enterprises which take Quite a bit of time in order to get it right. you know, in the past year we've landed some very large customers, which took, you know, more than 12 months to land. and that's the kind of thing that just takes, you know, it can drain you every day, every week. my gosh, you know, I can't wait. We're gonna do this. we gotta add this one more person to these things. You know, we do a lot of work with energy and telco and this is an area where like I said, we landed some really big ones over the past year and was really exciting to see the value be so obvious that even they could overcome the organizational inertia.
Josh Broward: I'm curious, did you start with enterprise customers? What size was your kind of first batch of customer?
David Aronchick: we did because like I said, there's there's really you know I could go to the most sophisticated small business in the world and more likely than not they're just not gonna see the value in what we provide. again, we can give them value, but if you're not processing like I said, on the order of you know a 10 gigabytes a month or 100 gigabytes a month, it's just not gonna be that much. I, you know, I I wish I could say it was, but it's just not. And so as a result, we knew that we were gonna have to start with you know, pretty large enterprises before anything else happened.
Josh Broward: what was your process for finding a way in and navigating those systems. Unless maybe you had a unique in because of your own history, but I often tell founders if your first target, if your beachhead market is enterprises, you're more likely to starve before you catch the whale.
David Aronchick: Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And there's there's really that is the absolute truth. And and you know, you're very kind about my pedigree, but that doesn't really, differentiate you from Adam out here. the truth is that you know we didn't have an answer for you, and this just some of the biggest ones we want got were pure kismet. I wish I could have said that there was some, absolute path here, but it is the the challenge and one of the reasons why I'm excited to talk because you know it's very hard to overstate how hard it is to break through and go to market in with these folks.
Josh Broward: Yeah, I think founders often underestimate the role of timing and luck in the journey. And there for sure is an element of being prepared kind of gives you better luck.
David Aronchick: Yeah.
Josh Broward: And for sure, there's an element of doing your research to understand the timing and all of that stuff. So I don't want to overestimate it, but sometimes the difference between one company that makes it and one company that doesn't is who was in the coffee line behind them.
David Aronchick: Totally agreed. Totally, totally, totally agreed.
Josh Broward: So we talked about the high, know, landing some big name enterprise customers is a huge deal. Sometimes it nets you more revenue than the total investment you got. Not always, but sometimes. And that can be a little bit mind boggling and, you know, pop the champagne kind of a situation. But it's not all like that. So. Let's talk about some of the low spots. One thing we say often is wisdom is failure redeemed. So I wonder if you could share with us one way that you redeemed failure or struggle, like a hard thing you went through and a specific thing you learned from it.
David Aronchick: I mean, one was just the approach we initially took. We thought that cost, for example, would just be an instant winner. Just not even close. everyone cares about cost, everyone wants things to work properly, everyone wants to be efficient in the way that they spend, you know, all that stuff. And it just seems so obvious to me. Yet, when we started digging into it, it was much less compelling than people cared about. the right people didn't own the budget, the right people didn't care about you know where the the dollars were gonna be saved, so on and so forth. That was a really weird and kind of hard lesson. you know again just just real strange for me. And so it required a pretty big pivot around what we were doing for spend. and customer outreach. So yeah, I that that was a really big thing for me.
Josh Broward: What did you find that your customers really did care about? What moved the needle for them?
David Aronchick: It was much more about human being time. Were they being efficient? like could we help cut cost and so on? you know, so on and so forth. There there was a lot there.
Josh Broward: So less about cost of the technology and more about cost of human time.
David Aronchick: yeah, it was the you know, the amount that people were spending, saving money, saving energy, saving time, maintaining these things were far more important to them than the the work involved. you know, dollar savings. Again, just big surprise.
Josh Broward: That's really interesting. I've heard some people say executives only care about three things. Money, mission, and risk. It sounds like what you're describing is somewhere in between money and mission.
David Aronchick: Yeah, the the problem is that money is usually not a really compelling factor. That is what I've found. And by that I mean almost to a person, depending on who you're talking to in the organization, they don't care about money. You're like, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? There's effectively two people in the company that care, quote unquote, care about money, right? The CFO and the CEO. Outside of those two people, the majority of people are trying to get stuff done, trying to make sales, trying to do this, trying to do that. they have other tasks. And CEOs and CFOs care about those things because the savings returns to them. But for everyone else, savings is purely a tax. The money doesn't come back to them, the budget doesn't come back to them. If they go find something that's three times more efficient, you know, if they were doing an ad campaign and they were spending three hundred thousand dollars and then all of a sudden they found something that was three times more efficient, now they can do it for a hundred thousand dollars. It's more likely than not that that money is not gonna, you know, let them go hire another person. it's not gonna come bring them back. If you're really of a forward looking organization, sure, maybe they get an attaboy at the next quarterly meeting, but That's then that's gone. it just doesn't add to that person, that program manager's business to be more efficient. They're like, well, I don't care. The money came from somewhere. Now, that doesn't mean that they won't care if the CEO or the CFO says, hey everyone, you gotta cut costs or you're fired. Sure, then it's gonna work. But that's a top-down mandate and very different. For us
Josh Broward: Hmm.
David Aronchick: coming in and trying to sell to anyone who is not one of those first two people is gonna say, I mean, that's just dead in the water. They're like, hmm, don't care. you know, I don't have a mandate. or if they do, that mandate would already been there. And so it's up to us to find the people who do have those mandates. But more often than not, it's just it's just pretty surprising.
Josh Broward: So what moved the needle for them was time for them and their team.
David Aronchick: Exactly. Like they do have a person, they do have a hire. as that person are they able to take those people that they've hired and redeploy them to new things 'cause they're spending less time doing this other stuff.
Josh Broward: Interesting. yeah, I'm just going back to the framework I mentioned earlier, money, mission and risk. Maybe time is kind of the thread between all of those. What's the biggest challenge you're trying to solve right now?
David Aronchick: It's some category of awareness, I would say, or or some form of top of the funnel challenges. It's very difficult to overstate that. You know, it's a such a noisy space out there, and even though we do all this amazing technology and function and capability and skill and yada yada yada, it is really hard to overstate how tough it is to to rise above the noise. You know, that's something that would be a big winner for us. it is rare that it is the case that someone comes in the top of the funnel and we can't have a good conversation with the right people and they're like, that I clearly see where this is gonna be valuable. It's much bigger challenge for us to to find the way to have that conversation with as many people as possible so they can self select in.
Josh Broward: Who do you find are the right people in organizations for you to talk to? Is it the CTO or is it is your doorway in usually someone much further down the chain who is some sort of data manager or IT ops
David Aronchick: know, again, you're you're kinda touching on a a really important point. For us, if we go in too high, CTO, CEO, they're almost always like, Yeah, that sounds great, but let me get you the right person 'cause I'm not the right person. if we go in too low, they have no budget authority, they have no ability to make any decisions whatsoever. they're like, Again, sounds good, but you know, I don't know what to do. it really is that that middle ground that that's the key one where it's, you know, how do I Find someone in the middle who is interesting enough to be curious about potentially a new platform, knows the scope of the challenges that they have as an organization, and can spend the time thinking about it. you know, having flexibility around their their background or priority list or things like that. So really Goldilocks in the middle.
Josh Broward: So someone at perhaps the VP or director level.
David Aronchick: Exactly.
Josh Broward: Okay. And when you find that person, I'm thinking about my experience in enterprise. I'm guessing if you're talking to a VP, they're like, I'm interested. Let me hand you off to this person who's going to basically do due diligence. Like who's going to research your tech and see if this will matter for us. Is that
David Aronchick: Yeah, exact exactly.
Josh Broward: okay? And then they report back to the VP and then the VP has to decide, this worth taking? taking a beating on my back to bring this up to the executive vice president.
David Aronchick: Exactly.
Josh Broward: How do you convince that person to be your internal champion?
David Aronchick: again it's it's you know, they're already gonna have their backlog. They're already gonna have their priority list for for this, you know, quarter, year, whatever it might be. for us it's aligning ourselves with that and saying, Hey, whatever you got there, we're gonna do it faster.
Josh Broward: So you say we can help you accomplish the stuff you're already trying to accomplish just 20 % faster.
David Aronchick: Exactly.
Josh Broward: That's compelling because everybody is like they have a huge list and it does tend to be backlogged and they're thinking how, you know, they've got, most of them have some kind of scorecard that gets a red, yellow, green rating and they've got a bunch of greens that are really should be shaded yellow and a bunch of yellows, they're trying to figure out how to get them to turn green and... If you can say, if you can convincingly say you can increase their green rate, all of sudden that's... That's the kind of thing that gets promotions.
David Aronchick: Absolutely. And again, they're not gonna believe you. I mean that's the truth of it, right? They hear this from every vendor in the world and twice on Sunday. they are just constantly out there being assaulted with this. And their ability to detect, are you bullshitting? Are they like adding value? Are you like serious about what you're saying? yeah, that's basically it.
Josh Broward: How do you overcome their bullshit meter?
David Aronchick: Well, I mean that's that's the challenge. again,
Josh Broward: You
David Aronchick: I'm lucky. I have a good background. They're like, well, okay, you got some credibility here. that said, that only goes so far, there's still people who still people out there, with pedigrees like mine who who are bullshit. ideally you get to their data as quickly as you can, meaning into their observability flows that they trust. And then
Josh Broward: Hmm.
David Aronchick: and then you go from there. Meaning like, okay, hey, here's Data that I know about. This isn't just bullshit data. And the here's this, that, and the other. let me I'm gonna go use that and and then off I go. or I I trust that and now you're working on, modern data. let's use that.
Josh Broward: do you find that it's usually a stair step process, like a little pilot, then like a kind of a
David Aronchick: Yeah, always, always.
Josh Broward: medium, like then a serious pilot that like people will actually pay attention to. And then like maybe you take over the data for a department or one particular thing before you get access to the whole.
David Aronchick: Yep, absolutely.
Josh Broward: Okay, so here's a different kind of question. You've been around a while, you've done some stuff in big companies, How has that caused you to evolve as a leader?
David Aronchick: you know I've I've gone in and out across my career of well two times CTO, two times CEO. how does it change? I mean you know, big companies, the thing that's hidden about a big company, I mean they move slow, but they also have insane amount of muscle in order to achieve what you what you'd like. so you you have the ability to, you know, get an entire marketing department or leverage the credibility of someone like Google or whatever. I mean, there's just a million things that these folks are able to achieve that that you know take would take years for you to achieve externally. so that's the biggest difference. the next difference down is that you can move insanely fast. You can make a decision tomorrow and have it be implemented you know on Monday.
Josh Broward: What do you think is your growing edge as a leader?
David Aronchick: no, that's an interesting question. I mean, I guess I I think I'm pretty good at storytelling and and painting the larger vision. I'm very good at communicating externally to what people need and and helping them you know see where, you know, one plus one equals three. and yeah, that's probably the biggest thing.
Josh Broward: Where are you still trying to grow? What's an area that you feel like you still need to evolve as a leader?
David Aronchick: Got it. for me, I think there is an element of you know hiring quickly, even if it means potentially a misfit hire or a little bit more expensive than my comfortable with early on. I've been told, I've been taught for years and years a CEO that has two jobs. job number one, make sure the company doesn't run out of money, and job number two is set the vision. And and that really is it. I'm a startup guy though, and so I've done this, you for a lot of my career, and it's very easy for me to say, well, I could do that, right? here's this marketing campaign. You know what? I could do it, right? I'll save a couple bucks doing that. you know, it's just my weekend. And I don't care. I'm lucky enough to, you know, knock wood. I I'm not gonna say be burnout free, but certainly seem to be resistant to burnout. which is not healthy, but still. you know, and and there are lots and lots of people out there who sell a sweet song and say, you know what I have an incredible Rolodex and I worked here and here and I know exactly how to sell and I know how to do this and that. And then they come in and do absolutely nothing. And that doing nothing is the best case. You know, I've had people
Josh Broward: You
David Aronchick: come in who are just the most toxic people in the world. Like, so it's not just doing nothing. If they did nothing, I would I would kill for it. But instead they like, you know, sow internal descent and set bad direction and you know, lie about you externally and all that kind of stuff. So I mean it really adds up and it could take, months or years to recover from that kind of thing. but that said, there truly are, you know, the one constant in this universe is there are 168 hours in a week. And I don't care who you are. that's not changing. And a human being can only accomplish so much in a hundred and sixty eight hours. and so your ability to find more people to accomplish more stuff is critical. And and I think that is an area that I struggle with. I don't I don't struggle trusting people. I probably trust people too much. I struggle getting the people in efficiently.
Josh Broward: How are you investing in yourself and your own leadership, whether it's in this area of learning how to onboard the right people in the right ways or in other ways that you're trying to grow as a leader?
David Aronchick: my biggest investments are you know, certainly bring people into the decision making. decide how to invest, where to invest, how to flex, you know, other people's skills. make it clear that I'm relying on them, that like it is, you know, hey look, I'm handing this decision off to you. Help me. You know, I need you to take agency here so that I don't have to check in six times and make sure something gets over the c over the line. you know, that that's w some of the biggest stuff that I'm doing.
Josh Broward: Alright, cool. Well, let me turn it over to you to ask me a question.
David Aronchick: I mean you see so many different businesses out there, even before you engage, or maybe it's after you engage, what's the most common thing where you're like, look, man, you could have saved time and energy and money, doing this yourself, even before, we talked. And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to like dissuade you from being a client. But like, what could
Josh Broward: Yeah.
David Aronchick: you have done? What what what could people be doing today that they're not doing?
Josh Broward: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll say three things that might be counterintuitive. And I might, this is a, you know, off the cuff answer. tomorrow I might have a deeper answer. But one, at the risk of self-promotion, I think most people should hire a coach sooner. Hiring a coach often fits effectively into the luxury category for founders. They're like, yeah, I would love to have that. if only I had enough money and, what often happens is a coach saves money in the long run because you make better decisions. You procrastinate less because you get to clarity faster or you procrastinate less because There's a lot of other junk clouding the process and a coach can help you say, is this what you're really worried about? Okay, let's talk about that. And then once you talk about that, they're like, okay, I'm ready to go. And so that's one thing is just getting an outside voice in the discussion. A second thing I think most founders should do much sooner than they do is get an assistant. whether you call it a chief of staff or a virtual assistant or admin and use them as almost as an extension of yourself. So, okay, here's this task that'll take 30 minutes or an hour. And I can certainly do it, but I can spend 10 minutes explaining it. And my assistant can do most of the work in 40 minutes and then I spend 10 minutes polishing it and it's done. And so I just cut my time by two thirds. There are so many tasks like that. And I think people wait too long. Even just to hire a 10 hour a week assistant can be a significant boost for most founders.
David Aronchick: Mm.
Josh Broward: the third thing, this one might be the most counterintuitive, is take a full day off every week, which often fits in the luxury category. people think of it as a luxury. I'll slow down when we raise our Series A or whatever the thing is. After I hire a COO, it'll be okay for me to slow down. But even if you're burnout resistant, there's something about the constant movement and engagement. that doesn't enable us to recharge fully. So
David Aronchick: Mm
Josh Broward: it's as if our battery is always running at 70 % and we never get it up to full charge, which I know on a phone it doesn't really matter, but if the battery also includes like directly influences your performance output.
David Aronchick: Mm.
Josh Broward: So people, think way more people brown out than burn out.
David Aronchick: Very, very interesting. I mean I I agree with all those. interestingly, I I do have a part time assistant. And they're good, but I I feel like I'm grossly underusing them. So even just advice on how to use them better would be
Josh Broward: Sure, yeah, happy to. I think the two things that are... the two ways I work with my assistant most are... Using that 1080. I well, I don't think I described it right But if if you consider how much work something takes as a hundred percent if you do ten or twenty percent of the work and They do sixty or eighty percent of the work and then you do ten or twenty percent of the work that saves a ton of time so I'll often have my assistant create a one-pager or Draft an email to like I know it needs to be a long email. I like our newsletter that kind of thing. Or sometimes I'll even say, hey, I'm driving home from dropping my son off at swim. I have this idea about a blog post I want. I've been telling people all week this. Or I told somebody this for the third time this month, and then I'll just talk for five minutes and say, can you turn that into a blog post? And then he'll combine that voice message with AI and get me a post that's 90 % there and then I can go in and fine tune it and what ends up happening is the net cost for me is about 15 minutes versus at least an hour and because it's an hour I would keep putting it off. where this way it's something I can get done, I can squeeze it in between things and it's less emotionally heavy. So it increases
David Aronchick: Hm, fair thing.
Josh Broward: my productivity that way. The other one, I'm not currently doing this, but I think it's a great way to work with assistance is when you finish a call, talk into WhatsApp or whatever your voice memo thing is for two minutes and say, just had this call with David. We talked about ABC. These are the things that I need to do. These are the things he promised to do. Also, by the way, he told me his kid just won an art prize. So I want to send him that article I saw about Monet or whatever. Like I don't know, maybe it was an impressionist art thing. And then the VA puts all of that together and puts it in your draft file. And again, it's the 108010 rule. And it makes it so you can send way better follow-up messages in way less time. Because if you had to actually write all of that, I mean, your chances of doing it go way down. at least for me.
David Aronchick: Yeah, I could totally see that. Totally. well cool. I mean that that's great for me.
Josh Broward: Yeah, that's it. Thank you so much for being part of this, David. I appreciate your time and for sharing your journey.
David Aronchick: Course. Thank you.
