[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone, welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner. Today, I am lucky enough to be joined by a very special guest. I will forgive him for being a Giants fan. he has a very extensive resume, MetLife, Citigroup, Quantify, ADP, Chief Architect, all over the place. very cool company he runs called, CTOs of Service, which I think, is a very A closely aligned business to what we do and software quality assurance and my company, so I think it made a lot of sense to have Marc on Marc Adler.

Hello, sir. How are you?

[00:00:58] Marc: Great, how are you?

[00:00:59] Jay: I'm great, man. I'm great. It's beautiful weather. I think that we're going to miss by this hurricane and, we've got that crisp fall weather outside.

[00:01:07] Marc: still recovering from the Giants 40 0 loss. So, well, we won't talk about that during this,

[00:01:13] Jay: we won't bring the podcast down with any talk of giants, today, but, so did you grow up in New York? You knew our guy and where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being this kind of tech guru and then eventually an entrepreneur?

[00:01:26] Marc: Well, I grew up in Queens, actually Jamaica, Queens. It's not too far from JFK airport. And the interesting thing is that my dad was a stockbroker for many years with the old Merrill Lynch, which is now part of Bank of America. So when I was a little kid, I used to go down to his office and watch the old guys with the cigars, and the smoke filled rooms watching the ticker tape.

And, so I kinda got this, I grew up with this very, Kind of gritty New York cigar chomping kind of, kind of attitude. So whether that's helped me get customers or drive them off, I, I don't know. But, I've been around for a long time.

Well, is it, was it an actual ticker tape back then, It was an actual ticker tape, right? It was actual ticker tapes with the, not the paper ticker tapes, but the tickers actually scrolling electronically across a wall. So it used to go there, the tickers used to scroll across the wall and the guys, the old guys used to come in there and watch the tapes and then yell out their orders to my father and the other brokers.

And so it was quite an interesting scene. it was straight out of the movie Wall Street.

[00:02:40] Jay: was going to say, it sounds like it's very similar. What do you have any, do you have one kind of, memorable story from that? I love those days of America. do you have any good ones you can share?

[00:02:51] Marc: well, the, maybe it's not, it's not a crazy story, but, the guy who was the broker at the ne next desk from my dad was a guy named David Komansky. So him and my father started out at Merrill Lynch at the same time. and we're brokers together. Fast forward 30 years later, Dave is the chairman of Merrill Lynch.

So, you know, my father did not become chairman, but Dave became chairman and Dave used to come around to our house all the time to play p knuckle with my father. So, Dave's success didn't really rub off on me. But, He became the, he became the chairman, of Merrill Lynch for many years.

He left, I think, right before the big dot com crisis, where he handed his reigns over to Stan O'Neill, who kind of did some not so great stuff with Merrill.

[00:03:46] Jay: Okay. Well, it sounds like he got a, at the right time. so was this, was CTO as a service kind of your first business that you started?

[00:03:55] Marc: No, it wasn't. It wasn't. So, if, if I can kind of go back, years, So I was one of the first Windows developers on Wall Street. Started off with Goldman Sachs back in the mid to late 80s. And, before I did that, I actually, I read it to some old college friends who were starting their own company.

And they actually hired me to write one of the very first word processors for Unix. So I wrote a word processor, I spent nights at my kitchen table, and I wrote a word processor. I showed it off at the very first Unix Expo in New York. And then, The company tried to sell it. and unfortunately the company collapsed due to some of the excesses of the 80s, which we won't go into here.

But, I ended up retaining ownership of the word processor. So I would be working at Goldman Sachs during the day, and I would be selling my word processor as shareware. In the evening, and I used to come home and I used to find my mailbox gradually filled with more and more checks for people who liked what I wrote and wanted to buy it.

So it became so, the checks became so, So much that I left Goldman Sachs and I started my own company, Magma Systems, to sell the word processor. And then I wrote some other software, which became pretty popular, mostly among developers. And I formed Magma Systems as an actual company, hired people, and I sold it off in the late 90s and went back to consulting.

So I do have a background of running my own company for a while.

[00:05:39] Jay: Wow. Sounds like more than a little, do you remember who the first customer was for that word processor?

[00:05:47] Marc: You know, I don't. I don't, but, I just, it got picked up by some organizations back in the day, there was a big shareware organization called PC SIG, and they actually made a little advertisement of me that you could actually find an old issues of like PC magazine and the checks just kept coming in.

So I don't actually remember the first customer, but a lot of them were, I sold the word processor at the time for 35. So there was a lot of teachers and a lot of students and, yeah. For what? For that 35, they got a really powerful word processor.

[00:06:22] Jay: I think just the word shareware could date some people, you

[00:06:27] Marc: dates.

[00:06:29] Jay: I don't know that people I know what that is, but I you know I don't know that it's a term that's used anymore. Is it do they do people say shareware

[00:06:37] Marc: no. Everything is open source now. So you get a lot of open source. But the concept behind shareware is you would give people a product that was either fully functional or mostly functional. And you say, if you like this, Here's just send me some money. So people like, like my word processor enough to send me the 35 and, and there are people who actually became quite wealthy and quite famous.

in the shareware route. So, yeah, if you take, if you read a, an old book on shareware, you have stuff like PC right and pro com and tools like that. and the, people who developed that and really marketed made a lot of money.

[00:07:17] Jay: So how did you make kind of the transition from the desktop software world into the sass, you know, kind of modern world? And when did that happen for you? Was there some sort of transition phase where you're like, Oh my God, this is like, not as big anymore. Or, I mean, I know desktop software is still alive and kicking, by the way, it's bigger than people I think would give it credit for it.

But did you have to make a transition at some point to the web, you know, kind of, frameworks.

[00:07:42] Marc: Yeah, at some point, you know, I was, after I sold the company, I was doing some consulting and I taught myself web technologies by basically writing a, kind of a message, a community board, something like patch. com, but I wrote it for my local neighborhood and it was an AS P, C sharp website. And, yeah.

and I, yeah. Put that out. And then, the way I kind of transitioned back into Wall Street after, you know, this adventure with, my own company and then with some consulting is, I got contacted by Citigroup with a really interesting thing. proposition. So they were looking for an architect for their equities division.

Now, by equities, I mean people who trade stocks and equity derivatives. And Citigroup at that time was about 350, 360, 000 people. And the equity division was probably about 10, 000 people with about 1500 2000 developers. And somebody called me and said, hey, Citigroup is looking for an architect. and you don't have to be, you don't have to be a developer.

You don't have to have financial experience, but you, you know, they said you could be a geologist, be an artist, be a musician. And that kind of attracted me. So I applied for the job, went in for the interviews, got the position and was a, was the architect for equity derivatives for my first year there.

yeah. My boss, who was the chief architect of the division, left the company and, I had a reputation of creating systems successfully, leading teams, creating systems that the traders and the business people liked. And my boss, who was the CIO, said, would you like to take over and become chief architect?

And so I did. So that was basically my first foray into a chief architect position. And since, there was since very, actually very few of the organizations I have worked for have had CTOs. So chief architect is kind of the de facto CTOs, the highest, technical authority within the certain division.

So I became the chief architect for the equities division of Citigroup.

[00:09:58] Jay: Okay. And it interesting. Little line you threw in there about the customers themselves, like the stuff that you were making. Do you think that your foray into running your own business and building your products and understanding customers and that do you think that kind of? It's almost like the reverse journey, right?

Where you're here, you're not working in the industry for 20 years and then taking that knowledge and going and building your own business. You kind of did it backwards and then kind of came back out the other side and do it again. But do you think that helped you in those roles by kind of living through how to deal with customers and how to take their feedback and how to understand how to build a platform for them?

[00:10:40] Marc: Yep. I think that was it. Running my own company and being on the phone and answering questions for customers and doing sales and schmoozing people. That was part of it. and luckily, as I mentioned, my background with my dad being a broker. I was very used to being on a broker floor with a lot of these cigar chomping New York guys, right?

So at Citigroup, my customers were the traders, were the people who used to be, sit on the trading floor. and yell out orders and all that. And people used to say that if a trader didn't like what you did, they take a garbage pail or an ashtray and hurl it at your head. So luckily I've never had anything hurled at my head.

And I, and I knew how to talk to those people because I was kind of, I came from a similar background. And so, I think that's one reason why. my customers really like me who were the traders, because I knew exactly what they wanted and I knew how to talk to them and I wouldn't take any BS and I wouldn't take, and I cut through a lot of the processes that Citigroup had in order to build these teams to deliver stuff to them.

[00:11:52] Jay: I think it's really important too, is like a, as a technology leader to. Have the context of your customers, right? Because there's a lot of people. I think that just want to build really great software and they want to just, you know, just build. But it sounds like you kind of. Under you, you just, you said customers, right?

Which I don't think you hear CCO say a ton and the good ones do, but you hear a lot of times it's more procedural. It's more technical. It's more just let's build this thing. And the product guys will tell me what the customers want and who the customers are. It's the fact that you were kind of tied into that.

I think may have kind of helps, you know, continue your success and building these things that people wanted to use, along those lines. Across these multiple chief architect roles, and this is a very selfish question for everybody listening. how did you deal with quality? Like, how was making sure that, you know, the applications weren't buggy or that, like, you know, you weren't having too much downtime.

Like, how did you ensure quality across all those projects since you're in these big high level roles? I mean, that's a very low level position sometimes. How did you from the top. Kind of ensure that the user experience was, you know, a high quality one.

[00:13:05] Marc: So I think for a lot of the software, we'd write all sorts of tests. We'd write the integration tests. We'd write the unit tests. We'd write all that stuff. And then what we also did at Citigroup is we actually hired ThoughtWorks to build something for us to build kind of a quality dashboard for us. So, Some of the guys, it's funny, there's some, there's a bunch of guys who are very well known from ThoughtWorks.

And at that early stage, we had them sitting in a conference room. In city group developing this kind of, quality dashboard. So people are familiar with what C. I. C. D. Is continuous integration, continuous delivery. Well, the continuous integration part is where you to test everything to make sure, you know, when you check in code, make sure stuff is still running.

And with a trading system, when you're building trading systems, you have to really be concerned about performance and latency. Of course, the regular functional bugs are the things you have to be concerned about, but you also have to know If, when you're building some sort of trading platform, if somebody checks in code, which degrades the system.

So basically the, you know, we had all these performance tests and units, all these various tests and ThoughtWorks at the time, they were very, they were promoting something I think was, I think it was called cruise control. I forget. It was some, it was, it was kind of a, A, a CI platform.

And so as soon as somebody checked in software, we'd run through all the tests. and if stuff degraded, you know, we'd know it on the dashboard and we'd have the blame and, you know, we could roll stuff back. but that's how we really approached it.

[00:14:55] Jay: and has,

[00:14:56] Marc: Yeah.

[00:14:57] Jay: how have you kind of taken that? Through your different roles, right? I mean, I know kind of sounds like you had a really good firm to work with there. How did you keep, you know, quality at the forefront as you're developing things? Because like you said, your customer focused and your customers are going to be the ones that noticed that shit sucks, right?

[00:15:16] Marc: Yeah.

[00:15:16] Jay: to, they're going to be the ones that let you know that things are buggy or they're slow or they're whatever. How did you get in all these different roles? Is that just something that you kind of continued to drive towards was like customer experience is number one.

[00:15:28] Marc: Oh, you have to. You absolutely have to. I mean, when you're, I mean, a place like MetLife, when you have trillions of dollars on the line, and if something is buggy and you can't fill a claim, or you're making a bad derivatives trade to hedge something, you absolutely have to. So you do carry all that through.

You want, you make sure that the development teams is. are all writing tests. You have to bring in that whole culture, that whole CICD culture, which unfortunately some of the companies did not have and, you have to introduce that. You have to introduce that kind of stuff. So, you know, one of the things that I helped bring, for instance, like to met life was something called, I forget team foundation server, which had a lot of support, like visual support for, For the whole C.

I. C. D. process. we would be using things like quick test pro to simulate customer actions to try to break stuff. So in all the places that I've been, I've really tried to stress, Q. A. And since right now I work with a lot of startups, if the startups have the budget, I always try to have Q.

A. And since right now I work with a lot of startups, if the startups have the budget, I always try to have An automated QA person there at the beginning, somebody who will understand all the use cases, who will code up a lot of the, not only happy path tests, but unhappy path tests and do all the soak and stress testing, the load testing, all that stuff.

So, yeah, I think that quality should be built in, to the corporate culture from day one.

[00:17:03] Jay: Beautiful. Well, I can talk to you about this all day. Obviously, this is all my, my, my world. So you're speaking my language, but, let's talk about TTO as a service. I think the, as a service model is still has a lot of legs in it. You know, there's a lot of things you see that you're like, all right, we're kind of at the end of this, but this, as a service model stuff, there still continues to be a ton of really good value at bringing in somebody that's an expert or a scalable team or whatever these things are.

where did the idea come from? How did you kind of kick that off officially? And then maybe who was your first customer there?

[00:17:39] Marc: So, so the way that I kick this off was all these years when I was, working these jobs as CTO or chief architect, people would have ideas, right? So I get a call. Hey, my friend has an idea for some. App which lets you find parking spaces or something like that. Like, that's just one example. And the guy has a great idea and he doesn't know what to do.

He doesn't know how to make an app out of it. Right? Would you meet with him? So, what I would do is I would have a lot of these meetings with people and they would say, Okay, here, I have this idea. Would you join me? Would you be the technical co founder and do this? And I'd say, No, I really can't. I don't have the time to do this, but, excuse me, let's go out for a beer and I'll kind of sketch out for you what you need to do.

I'll tell you how to hire a development team. I'll tell you how to get a, you know, to get a cloud provider. I'll kind of draw some circles and hook them together and show you what an architecture should be. Like that. So then I was chief architect for ADP, which is the very big payroll HR company. And, I early retired back in late 2018.

I reached some milestones, which I had set up years ago. And I just said, okay, I'm going to leave the workforce. Then I said, well, what am I going to do for a living now? Like, you know, am I just going to sit there and watch football games all day? Or am I going to do something? And I said, you know what? All these people have been asking me for advice for all these years.

Why don't I hang a sign up in front of my door saying, CTO for rent, or CTO as a service, and next time somebody says they need technical help, well, I'll charge them for it, right? I'll help them on a few hours a week, a few hours a month, and I'll charge them for it. And that's where the idea came from. I sat around and I made myself a little website.

And we find it and put the website up there and my first customer was actually an educational technology company that, I had been giving free advice to and I went up to the founder and I said, Hey, I'm kind of in business now. you know, anybody in your startup world who needs help for a reasonable price?

And they said, Nope, we'd be happy to pay you. So that was my first gig, with this ed tech company being their fractional CTO and doing all of the technical leadership that they needed.

[00:20:12] Jay: Now, are you looking to have, that's a great story, by the way, are you looking to have employees again, or are you just looking at this to be, you know, the mark show and you're the main guy and you're doing consulting and that's it.

[00:20:29] Marc: It's just a mark show. Now I get email all the time from people who say, Hey, you have a great idea. Let me help you scale out your organization. I don't want to. magma systems. I just, you know, I think that I could do the best job right now being alone, not having to worry about a lot of, internal politics and meeting payroll, things like that.

And if I need to bring in specialists, I will. I know enough specialists out there where I can bring in specialists on an as needed basis. I'll go out and vet and hire the development teams. for my clients and, I think that I, I'm best right now just being Marc Adler and I will always just be Marc Adler as CTO as a service.

[00:21:19] Jay: I love that. I do. I love that very much. I think, it's stressed a little too much. The scaling and the growth and the whatever, like businesses can be whatever. You want them to be, and this is what you want it to be. So that's fantastic. All right. I have one other question for you, non business related. I always love this question for very successful people like you, because it's always usually an interesting answer. If you could do anything in the world. Non business related. What would it be? And you knew you couldn't fail. What would it be?

[00:21:52] Marc: I've always said I would be the drummer for classic Genesis. So classic Genesis.

[00:21:59] Jay: you have the one big, the one big song, right? The, is that was, what drum line am I thinking of?

[00:22:07] Marc: this would be the Genesis. that had Peter Gabriel in it. So we're talking about old classic Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and, you know, the, so my, my, my dream was always to throw Phil Collins off the drum seat and be the drummer for Genesis. So that's the one thing I would do.

Now there's really no more classic Genesis and I'm on to teaching myself classical

[00:22:31] Jay: saw that. I saw that. Congrats, dude. That's big. I love that.

[00:22:35] Marc: I am really into it and then rediscovering my musician roots and so, yeah, so I do a little bit of CTO ing and a little bit of guitar playing and it's a nice, and a nice film.

[00:22:47] Jay: classical guitar, you mean classical guitar, or are we talking like, you know, 60s, 70s,

[00:22:54] Marc: No, we're talking about classical as in Johann Sebastian

[00:22:59] Jay: All right. I wanted to make sure I thought so. I mean, that's a very different style of music, but, I love that too. Is that the one with the double strings? It has the like a 12 string

[00:23:08] Marc: no, I mean you could, you know, you might be able to play that stuff with 12 string. No, it's the ordinary 6 string, 6 string guitar. So, it's funny, I love classical music, but I'm also a headbanger. I love bands like Meshuggah also and Black Sabbath. So, I go both ways.

[00:23:25] Jay: I love it. I love it. All right. Marc, if people want to find you or hire you as a CTO for their CTO as a service, where can they find you?

[00:23:37] Marc: org Or even just connect with me on LinkedIn or send an email to Marc with a C at CTOasaservice. org. And that's it.

[00:23:50] Jay: What a great story you have, my friend.

[00:23:53] Marc: I got millions

[00:23:54] Jay: I know. I feel like we're going to have to do this again. and you can just, I'll just sit back and you can tell me stories. all right. Well, you know, I would wish your Giants luck, but they're in my division in football, so I'm not going to do that, but I will wish you a great weekend.

who are they playing this weekend? Are they playing this

[00:24:09] Marc: I don't know, but you could actually wish the, you know, since you don't compete, wish the New York Liberty, the women's, basketball team. You could wish them luck. So there's no Philadelphia

[00:24:19] Jay: All right, beautiful. I will do that. I'll be a liberty fan. I did see that they're playing all right, Marc. You're awesome, dude. Thank you for your time, brother. We'll talk again soon. All

[00:24:26] Marc: It was great.

[00:24:27] Jay: Thanks, buddy. See ya

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