[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I'm lucky enough to be joined by Carl Gould.

He is the CTO and co-founder, co-creator of Inductive Automation. Carl, hello my friend. How are you?

[00:00:39] Carl: Good. How are you doing Jay?

[00:00:41] Jay: I'm good. this is your first podcast. I'm so excited. this is great. 

[00:00:45] Carl: be gentle. 

[00:00:46] Jay: We got, yeah, well, we gotta be nice 'cause then you'll never go on another one again. So we'll take it easy on you today.

No, Carl, you're an awesome guy. we had a chance to meet at, seven CTOs, 0111 conference in, San Diego. And, we've kept in touch since. You're a cool guy. Run a really cool company. I wanna hear more about it. What is inductive automation?

[00:01:04] Carl: Yeah, we make a, our main product is called Ignition. It's software for the industrial automation space, and it's used in all kinds of different industries around the world to build various kinds of applications used in industrial automation.

So we can get deep into what that really means if you want, but that's what we do.

[00:01:25] Jay: So you, when we talked about this originally, you explained it very, very well. I think you. You kind of use CAD as an example. It's almost like a canvas kind of thing, right? Like you kind of give people the brushes to paint with

[00:01:38] Carl: that's right. That's right. So we give engineers a. Platform and a tool set to both build and deploy industrial applications. So in our world, there's all kinds of acronyms, like HMI and SCADA and MES that anyone in this world is very familiar with and anyone outside of this world has never heard

[00:01:56] Jay: no idea. That's right.

[00:01:58] Carl: but don't worry about any of that. You know, it's, The way I like to explain it, so like if you go into a factory or any kind of industrial facility of any kind, there's gonna be a lot of machines doing things. There's gonna be a lot of people trying to run the place, and then there's gonna be a bunch of computer screens everywhere that are giving those people some sort of. Control supervisory information about what their process is up to and the ability to interact with it, monitor for alarm conditions or change set points, or start a batch of product or whatever it is that they're doing. we build the software that engineers use to build those applications. So the cad, analogy is like. Autodesk builds AutoCAD. AutoCAD is used by engineers to design buildings or bridges or products or what have you. So we have a similar sort of setup where we as inductive automation build a product called ignition. Ignition is used by control systems integrators to build actual industrial applications used by. Manufacturers or, you know, water wastewater treatment plants, data centers for energy and cooling management, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:03:20] Jay: Great. And I would, I wanna talk a little bit more about how you. Kind of built that ecosystem, for integrators a little bit later. But because I mean, that's like a kind of a, almost like a separate way to build software, right? Like almost like one, one person removed from the actual end client. So I'm sure it's like a very interesting process to build that initially, but then also, you know, kind of support that and evolve it along the way.

So we'll talk about all that stuff. What I do wanna know is where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:03:52] Carl: Yeah, I would say both the where and the when I think

had significant impact. So I grew up in the Bay Area in California, north Bay, and. I graduated high school in the year 2000. So that means I was coming of age basically with the modern internet, right? So I sort of, started paying attention in what now I sort of think of as the Goulden age of the internet. you know, back in the late nineties and especially in the Bay Area. Technology, computers were just all around. and I was lucky enough to have a, personal computer in my house. Growing up we had an 80 86 and then a 2 86 and a 3 86 and a 46 and a pen. And so I grew up tinkering and playing with computers my entire childhood. lucky enough to just know exactly what I wanted to do, going out of high school. It was definitely gonna be something with computers. 'cause that was really what I was into. And the entrepreneurial spirit sort of, I think, sort of rode along with that technology in that era.

Right. it was just so obvious in the late nineties that if you were into computers there was just all kinds of interesting things you could build.

And the whole world was essentially being remade. In the personal computer and internet era at that moment, and so

it just, there was just so many fun things you could do with that skillset.

[00:05:29] Jay: Yeah. No, that's a great, that's a great point. Do you think I had a computer? You know, I'm assuming you know, your mom or dad obviously like had a computer in the house or something. Do you feel like we had, did we have an advantage? Is that like, is that the 

[00:05:41] Carl: Absolutely. 

[00:05:42] Jay: we got into tech? Because we had, I mean, do you think that, I wonder if there's like a statistical line where it's like people without a computer in the nineties went off and were like lawyers and accountants and shit, and then people whose parents had even some old dusty dos machine in the house was enough.

I mean, that's what we had. It was like 

[00:05:59] Carl: Old dusty dos machines were great for learning,

right? I mean, right. 

[00:06:02] Jay: awesome. It was great. And you had the, oh

[00:06:04] Carl: quick basic on a DOS system

and wrote madlibs for my sister, and, yeah, I, you know, having that in the house, being able to tinker with it, and those machines demanded tinkering,

[00:06:14] Jay: 

[00:06:14] Carl: right? Like today's computers and phones and whatnot, they just work so well.

You don't really have to tinker with them to get them to work.

But in that era. If you wanted to do anything interesting with a computer, you had to kind of dig in and

[00:06:29] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:30] Carl: read the manual and experiment.

And I think that was useful. Training ground, I mean, I think it's sort of, what do they say necessary but not sufficient.

[00:06:38] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:38] Carl: I think having that technology available is a necessary precondition, for, or certainly useful for getting into this type of a

career. 

[00:06:50] Jay: Yeah. It's, and it's an, it's a, and now we're on the other end of the spectrum where. The internet and technology is everywhere and you almost have to like protect your kids from too much exposure. And it's like, we were like, we didn't have that. Or it was just like, just do as much as you possibly could and learn as much as you possibly can.

Because like the dangers were like still out here. And now it's like, you know, I have a 13-year-old with the phone that I'm like fighting to like how much does he have it and how much does he not? And like how much do I teach him about how to use Che GBT versus like not because he is gonna get in trouble at school and like all, you know, this is so weird.

[00:07:23] Carl: It's totally changed.

[00:07:25] Jay: that we've gone through now. That's 

[00:07:27] Carl: Nothing today I think about having access techno to technology is gonna be predictive of having a career in technology.

[00:07:35] Jay: Yeah, we can, yeah, you almost have to, well, if you don't, then you might as well just move out to a cabin in the woods. Like, 'cause you're not gonna be part of modern society. And even the pediatrician was like telling my wife, like at some point now they basically consider it less.

Less beneficial to keep the phone from them because all their friends have it and like you become a little disconnected socially at some point. There's some point where like you almost kind of have to. Give in to like, be part of this big social experiment with all these little kids running around with like, all the technology in the world, like in their hands.

So it's definitely a, an interesting spectrum. We've lived over, over the past, you know, 20, 25 years. So what was, you took all that stuff. you know, I relate to a lot of that stuff. We were three years apart, so I, you know, I was in that same,kind of mindset back then. So what did you do with that?

Tinkering computer, I'm gonna, you know, kind of be a builder kind of mindset. Where did you go with that after, you know, you kind of graduated and you moved on a little bit.

[00:08:28] Carl: Yeah, so, I graduated high school and I went to, uc, Davis, also in California obviously. And,I started out as a computer engineering major, which is sort of a blend of hardware and software. But pretty quickly, I realized that writing software was really what I thought was the most fun thing because it enabled you to just. You know, build castles in the sky and, I couldn't get enough of it. So I switched to be a computer science and engineering major, and I did throughout school. I had an internship where,like a financial services company in Sacramento and I was a QA intern and the. The work there was sort of boom and bust.

And so there were times during that internship that they didn't have a lot for me to do. And so I picked up a book on Java and I read it cover to cover. And I've basically been programming in Java ever since. and. Let's see. From there I went and I thought I was gonna get into academia, so I went and, worked for the computer science research department at Davis for a while. Wrote a paper, did that whole thing, and I was actually. Two or three weeks into a grad program, a master's program at Davis when we, started the company Inductive Automation with a friend of mine who I met in compiler's class and I dropped outta grad school. 'cause it was just so much fun. I've been doing it ever since.

[00:10:00] Jay: Beautiful. That's a great story. I like that. What problem did you guys set out to solve? I mean, you're young at that time, like solving a manufacturing like display prob like what was the pro, what did you guys see? How did you even get in interested in this space of like, you know, manufacturing and all the stuff you do now?

[00:10:21] Carl: Right, because it's a space that not very many people are even aware exists. and so the way this all started was my friend and colleague in college, Colby Clegg. He got a sort of summer job at a control systems integrator in Sacramento. And the owner of that company, they'd been doing control systems engineering in Sacramento for I, I don't know, since the mid to late eighties I believe. And. You know, this is 2003, and the owner of that company had started becoming very frustrated with the available software solutions in the industrial automation space. And what he really wanted to be able to do was just take industrial data, think. Tank levels and pressures and temperatures and conveyor amperage, usage, whatever, measurements essentially from factories. He wanted to take it and he wanted to. Connect it to SQL databases and store those, that data in SQL databases. Remember 2003, this is like right when the sort of lamp stack was really taking off and, you know, freely available. SQL databases were the hot thing in tech and. His customers had all this industrial data and they had SQL databases often on their network that held work orders and bus business

data, and he wanted to be able to connect those two systems together and the software on the market at the time simply couldn't do that. And so he brought Colby in as a summer job to essentially write a little utility that would help him connect industrial data to SQL databases.

and then about maybe five, six months later, Colby pulled me in and said, Hey, we've got this, you know, I got this fun job in Sacramento. Dealing with industrial data and I get to, you know, head out to wineries and connect to these interesting little control devices called PLCs and do these interesting projects.

But now we need an application to present this information.

To the operators who are on site.

We've got this data in the database, now we need to do something with it. And, I had some experience with Java as I mentioned already, and with, like swing user interfaces. And so they brought me in to, to build that piece of the tech stack.

[00:12:46] Jay: Mm-hmm. So, from there, you kind of doing this summer job or doing this interim job and you're kind of, you know, young. And so when did it go from like. Hey, this is just something that we're doing and we're building it for this guy to like, oh, we could take this, or we, you know, we could really make something that it stands alone by itself.

[00:13:07] Carl: Yeah, that's a good question. So I initially, we were really building the software for the control systems integrator that we were working for.

[00:13:17] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:18] Carl: and we were basically, you know, programming for a few weeks and then we would go out in the field and use our software. You know, we got paired up with an actual control systems engineer, like a PLC programmer, and we would work together in some project that this, this company had, and then we would use our own product and then come back and program for a few more weeks and make it do more interesting things and go back out. And we actually came up with the name Inductive Automation originally, as a bit of a smoke screen because the companies of this control systems integration firm. We're not real comfortable buying software from their control systems integrator. It

would be like if you went to a mechanic and they needed to order a part and they said, well, but if you want, I've got these, you know, 23 year olds in the back, in the machine shop, and they could like mill you a part.

And you might be like, I don't know, that seems,

[00:14:14] Jay: Right.

[00:14:15] Carl: it doesn't seem like a great idea. so we came up with the name Inductive Automation, to sort of create some maybe mental separation

between the two companies. And after about a year and a half of doing that, we. Thought, gee, we might have something here. And we started trying to talk to other control systems integrators, because the owner, his name is Steve Heckman, the owner of the, of, the control systems integration company that we were sort of, created inside of. he is a really passionate guy and he had all these passionate. Very strong opinions about the industry and the other companies in the industry, the other vendors, the other software solutions. And you know, here we were young, fresh outta college and we're like, wow, this guy's, he's got a lot of very strong opinions. And what was really incredible is as we started talking to other control systems integrators, the degree to which his opinions matched up with. Everybody we talked to was really eye-opening, and we were like, oh, wow, we're really onto something here.

we're really solving a problem that seems pretty universal in this space.

so then we, we all decided, Hey, let's try to make a pure software play out of this.

[00:15:34] Jay: And what was the owner's kind of thought on that.

[00:15:39] Carl: He had a lot of thoughts. You know, there was a lot of. Pain points in the industry at the time. Again, this is 2002, 2003, that era and a lot of the software vendors in the space, they're. Big storied com, multinational companies, think, you know, Rockwell and GE and Siemens, these sorts of companies, and they had these products on the market that really had been developed in the early nine, early to mid nineties. some of them adapted from, technology even earlier, and it just hadn't really kept up with how technology was, as you remember, really rapidly changing at that time. Right?

So all of a sudden you've got web servers and free databases and all this incredible IT technology. that was creating so much value in the technology world, and they hadn't taken that and applied it into the problems of the industrial space.

So there was like a big technology gap

[00:16:43] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:43] Carl: that was just like waiting to be filled.

And then there was also sort of a big, how do we do business gap? You know, these companies, the way that they did business was what we thought as 20. 23 year olds pretty old school, right? Like, you wanna try the software out, well call somebody up and see if you can meet with your local rep.

and you know, there, there wasn't a way to download the software from the website and it was a very sort of traditional hardware company way of doing business with local distributors and a lot of bureaucratic layers.

And we thought, well gee, you know, even apart from the technological fit of the product we were trying to build, there was a whole how do we do business angle of, well, we'll just, you know, do sales calls over a GoToMeeting, which was novel at the time. and we'll put a built in trial mode into the software so that you can just download it. And so we had all these, what. Now in, in hindsight, seemed like revolutionary ideas. At the time. They seemed kind of obvious. They still sort of seem obvious, but in this space they were pretty novel.

[00:18:06] Jay: Okay. No, I love that. and was there. Was there any friction between, you guys going off to do this on your own? and Steve, the guy who kind of came up with the idea and maybe fostered the environment or was just like, you guys take this and go run with 

[00:18:20] Carl: Oh no. He came along with us for the

ride, so there wasn't any friction there. Yeah.

[00:18:24] Jay: it. 

[00:18:24] Carl: Yeah. He's still involved, 

[00:18:26] Jay: Okay, cool.

so, who do you remember who your first customer was?

[00:18:31] Carl: Okay. So if you take out, you know, the Control Systems integration company had a bunch of customers that we were using the software at. Take those aside. Those were mostly wineries, the occasional manufacturer in the Central Valley. the first customer I recall landing as like a customer we didn't do the integration for was a Sierra Nevada brewery in Chico. We, I remember going up there with Steve to do a sales.

Pitch, which was probably the first sales pitch I'd ever done. And you know, I'm all of 23 years old probably. And I remember showing up, oh, and I was a big beer enthusiast at the time, so I was all excited to, to pitch us here in Nevada. And so we go up there and they sit us down in this nice, I don't know, conference room and I basically give him a demonstration of our software and we. You know, do our little dog and pony show. and we leave. And they ended up buying the software and many years later,they were recalling their memory of that. Story and they were laughing and they were like, well, what you didn't realize was that you were pitching us directly after one of your big competitors had come in and pitched us on basically their take on how trying what, trying to solve the problem we were trying to solve, which again, was about connecting to databases.

and, you know, their solution was like two orders of magnitude. More expensive.

I, you know, we were, we had very naive pricing upfront and, I think we were pitching something that was all of like $800 to this company. And, they were laughing that, you know, it was so cheap that they might as well have just taken out their wallets right there at the, at the conference room and purchased a copy on a whim just to see if it would work. so we thought that was amusing.

[00:20:27] Jay: That's great. I love that. yeah, I mean, do you think it, I mean, I think I know the answer to this question, but, how much has it helped or did it help back then to kind of have, you know, Steve there as the guy with the, you know, historical industry knowledge and kind of some of these big ideas and, you know, is, did, I guess the question is how much did that help then?

And then how did you guys start to internalize. That over the years for yourself to where you could, you know, kind of stand on your own feet and not need, you know, that sort of mentorship in those situations.

[00:21:03] Carl: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, in the early years, I mean, it was absolutely crucial. 'cause coming outta college, we'd never heard of any of this

[00:21:12] Jay: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:21:13] Carl: And so, you know. All of the opinions he had and intuition he had for what does this market need? how do you approach, you know, the pitching to customers versus trying to get an integrator on board. You know, where are the solution fits and gaps that we're trying to fill? Those were all. All him initially, but you know, it's, it doesn't take long when you start jumping in with two feet into an industry before you start understanding the industry. And so, you know, even as soon as a few years in, we felt like we understood the industry pretty well. but you know, his opinions and business guidance were invaluable and are still, you know, very valuable to us.

[00:22:04] Jay: Love that. All right, well, let's fast forward. it kind of kind makes sense of where you guys were with your first customer back then. how has it changed? Who's your customer today versus who it was back then?

[00:22:19] Carl: That's a good question. I mean, you know, we are very diversified. I would say early on a lot of our customers were in food and beverage, water wastewater and manufacturing, like consumer packaged goods. that's really where we, those are the industries where we got started and. We would land customers who were very bottom up.

So, you know, we would land one small piece of a fact of one factory within some larger company because somebody there, Was an early adopter of some kind and willing to take a chance on a relatively small unknown vendor to, to solve some small problem. And we really followed a land and expand kind of, of approach.

So we wouldn't try to come in, you know, if you, I remember one time we were at a trade show and you know, we've got a booth and people are walking by and you're trying to, you know. Pitch to the people walking by and someone walks by and say, Hey, do you need a new SCADA system? And a SCADA system is like a big deal.

It's like the whole system that runs a plant

[00:23:33] Jay: Sure.

[00:23:34] Carl: and they're like looking at these kids at this booth and like, no way. Like, I don't need a SCADA system from you.

It's like, okay, well do you need to log some industrial data to a database maybe to run some reports? Oh yeah. that could be useful. So, you know, we would find these little. places to get a foot in the door.

[00:23:51] Jay: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:51] Carl: nowadays we have, I think, the name and reach to approach the market differently, and we can come in and. Talk to a customer at sometimes, not the absolute ground floor sometimes. We're now coming in and talking a few layers

up,and approaching larger problems from the get go.

We're also now really well diversified across, basically every industry you can imagine. So we're not quite so focused on food and beverage, although we still have a ton of customers in food and beverage.

[00:24:28] Jay: How do you stay excited? After doing it for 22 years, I think. Right? Or it's been a long 

[00:24:34] Carl: It's been a long time.

[00:24:35] Jay: is it the diversity of stuff you guys get to work with, is it the team, is it a combination? what, like when you wake up in the morning, how are you still excited to come do the same thing that you've been doing for so long?

[00:24:45] Carl: Yeah, that's a good question. and that can be challenging at times. The, for me, the. The way to stay excited is to keep in contact with the people who find your product valuable to their life.

They're to their job, to their careers, and we have tons of those. And so we, one of the things we do is we host a user conference called, ICC, the Ignition Community Conference, and integrators and end users, they all come and we meet for three or four days and share best practices.

And you get to see what people are building. And when I get to see what people build with the software that I.

Still, it's very motivating, very inspiring. We've also started, doing these field trips, called the Industry Immersion Program, where we take maybe a dozen or 15 of our employees and we fly them

out to go on factory tours.

So, you know, put on your steel to boots

and your hard hat and and go tour factories.

And I don't know you, do you remember the TV show, how it's made?

[00:25:57] Jay: Oh yeah. Love that show. Yeah.

[00:25:58] Carl: Fun show, right?

It's like that, but you're, you know, on set.

and that's really fun. That's really motivating. So I love doing that kind of stuff.

[00:26:07] Jay: Yeah. I love that. And being connected to the ones that you're providing value to. I definitely agree. Like that's a way to just consistently feel that urge to continue adding value to their side of the equation. we switch gears entirely. personal brand. You run this cool company, you've been doing it for a long time, you've had a bunch of different roles.

You're, you know, co-founder, your CTO, you're all this different stuff along the way. how much do you think about that? How much do you worry about that? do you, like, do you want people to know Carl outside of inductive automation? Are you guys the same thing in the public eye? Like are you, I mean, obviously we all kind of exude.

Some appreciation for the company that we with or we're we own or we're with or whatever. We're on social media. But do you separate 'em at all? Is it all kind of the same thing? That's the thought leadership leading back to inductive. Do you worry about any of it at all? Do you let other people in the company do that?

What's your take on like who Carl is supposed to be kind of, you know, publicly facing?

[00:27:06] Carl: Boy, that's an interesting question. I don't think about it very much. I'm not super active on LinkedIn. I don't seek out podcasts to go on. This is

[00:27:16] Jay: Yes, I came to you to be, so everybody knows Carl did not solicit this for me. This is me soliciting Carl. So, no, but just in general and generally speaking, I mean, you know, what else out there? I mean, you went, 

[00:27:26] Carl: Well, I can't avoid it

like it's there whether I like it or not.

That's something I've come to appreciate, you know, because, you know, I'm on stage at ICCI, I am visible, to, to some degree or another, so to the best of my ability. I just try to make sure that when I am speaking, I'm saying something. Interesting or of value to somebody,

[00:27:50] Jay: Yep.

[00:27:51] Carl: right. As opposed to trying to build a brand for my own benefit.

that said, we have people at Inductive Automation who do that part of the job far better than I do, and I'm happy to let them, you know, have that, limelight as it were.

[00:28:10] Jay: Okay. That's fair. well, I mean, you know, I think you're, to be fair, you know, you're not hiding in the office all day. Like I met you at a conference with hundreds of people and you're out doing your thing. So, I mean, that, that is. A completely fair answer, I think, to that question. And there's like this, you know, founder, expectation out there that you're kind of, you know, out shooting finger guns being the cool guy in front of, and like, you don't have to do that.

especially if you're presenting, you know yourself as just the guy who runs like, you know, some really cool tech and a really cool company, and that's what you're passionate about then. Like if that's what people know you for. You know, un inductive are kind of tied at the hip, and I think that everybody eventually realizes that, that doesn't have to be an individual.

It doesn't have to be grouped together. You can kind of. Play off each other, especially as social media evolves and it's not as like static as it, you know, was, and it's just, you know, it depends on what you want your image to be. So, you know, I think, you know, you're a very approachable, nice guy and the times I've met you in public and, you know, seeing you here, you've got a great public facing persona.

So, I don't think it's the right answer to that question. I just love to answer that, ask that question of, Especially nerdy people like me and people like you that like grew up doing computer stuff that like are prob, you know, I'm introverted. I don't like, I don't, I put this on, you know, I walk out, walk in the door and I'm like, this is who I am right now.

but it's, you know, it's an interesting thought, especially someone who's like, is, loves the tech as much as you do. you know, that's social piece versus the technical piece. If you had to start over tomorrow, same company, same industry, same space. What will be step one tomorrow to get this business up and running?

[00:29:52] Carl: If I had to. Boy, that's a tricky question because, there's so many nuances. if I had to start over knowing what I know now at the time that I started it, or if I had to start over today in

[00:30:08] Jay: Today, in today's world,

[00:30:09] Carl: oh shoot, that's a lot harder.

[00:30:11] Jay: I know.

[00:30:13] Carl: you know, I really do think that the most important thing is making sure. I think that technology people, software people, we get so excited sometimes by technology itself, and I think sometimes we find solutions first and then look for the problem that they, that the solution fits.

[00:30:42] Jay: Yep. Yep,

[00:30:44] Carl: think that's a good idea. I think you have to be absolutely certain that you're solving an actual problem for actual people in an actual market,

[00:30:55] Jay: yep. God, I couldn't agree more. Could not agree more.

[00:30:58] Carl: that is the 'cause if you have that, because rest of it. We'll follow, right? Like, I mean, there's a million things you could say about go to market strategies and, you know, finding your first customer, right? there, there's so many things there, but it's gonna be all so much easier if you know, and you are solving an actual problem for

people. 

[00:31:24] Jay: Could not agree more friend. It still shocks me how prevalent the former, you described there is, and you can get away with it for a little bit. You can solve a problem for, you know, some people. But, yeah, I mean, that's it dude. Solving a painful problem for enough people. It makes it worth it for you.

Like that's, it's like, it's really it, right? It's like problem plus market equals like, you know, and if you, so I totally agree. I love that answer. All right. I have one more for you. This is non-business related. So non inductive automation. this is, just about Carl. Like, if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:32:10] Carl: Well, with, Bobby Weir passing. It makes me think about joining a Grateful Dead tribute band, but I think my real answer probably would be sailing around the world.

[00:32:20] Jay: Okay. Wow, that's a good one. And I mean, the rockstar one, you know, obviously you 

in this scenario, so you can do whatever you want, but I sail around the world. did you ever hear that book? 483 days. I just found this. It's a, it's a guy who was a fisherman in Mexico that got blown off course and was at sea in like, in the doldrums, like off of Peru or whatever, where like, it's basically the desert, like on the water.

[00:32:46] Carl: Mm-hmm. 

[00:32:46] Jay: 483 days, and he ended up in the Marshall Islands, like 6,000 miles away. And just like the story of like, like you wanna talk about like never give up. I mean, the dude was like, like chewing on pieces of the planks from the wood to get so like, and there's like his own beard. He was like eating a, I mean, it was like bad.

I mean, you're in the middle of, he was in an icebox. That was his only way to like. Shield himself from the sun out there. So anyway, that reminds me of that 

[00:33:15] Carl: you're into that, I,

got two recommendations

[00:33:18] Jay: alright, let's hear it. Let's, okay.

[00:33:21] Carl: a similar story from the seventies, I believe.

[00:33:24] Jay: quoted that book in this one, so, yes. I am meant to read that. Yeah. 

[00:33:27] Carl: And the wager. 

[00:33:28] Jay: The wager, all right, I'm gonna write these 

[00:33:30] Carl: you're into, you know,

[00:33:32] Jay: Survival, survi Survival, and, yeah. Okay. I'll check these out. Well, I think, sailing around the world is a great one. I would love to do that too. I don't know. I feel like I want that. And then like a month in, if you're like, if it's not great, you're like, this is tough.

This might, maybe I would've done the Grateful Dead Tribute band instead of, you know, be out in the middle of the Pacific about to die. But,Carl, you're awesome. I love your energy, man. if people want to reach out to you directly about something they heard today, how do they do that?

[00:34:01] Carl: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and I even log in there sometimes and

[00:34:05] Jay: Wow. Hopefully somebody finds the timing and it's right and you happen to be in there that, that quarter of the year and,they'll reach out. But, Carl great. I love the story, man. It's so cool. I'd love to have you back on some day, dig in a little bit deeper. I wanna talk about kind of how you built that, you know, ecosystem of builders, which is a pretty cool kind of concept as well.

So, let's stay in touch. You know, we follow along with the story, like you said. I mean, I know a lot of people know the name automation. You guys have built a really cool product and brand. it's been something you should be proud of, man, and I'm really glad to have you on and, I think you did great for your first podcast.

So, you know, here's to many more, brother and,we'll talk to you again soon. All right. Thanks, Carl. See you, man. Later. 

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