[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 Mr. John Weidenhammer. He started his company 48 years ago in Reading, Pennsylvania. since then, he has grown it to a global digital brand, 150 professionals, the most admired CEO by Lehigh Valley Business, which is probably my favorite award, Philadelphia Business Journal's Technology Disruptor Award, and this May, he's delivering the commencement address at Albright College.

Please welcome Mr. John Weidenhammer. John, how are you, buddy? Good to see you.

[00:01:01] John: Hey, Jay, I'm doing super. So great to be with you, and thanks for providing me with this opportunity to share my story

[00:01:07] Jay: Oh, man, I was telling you before the show, a legend in the space, and, I think I'm lucky and everybody's lucky to get a little bit of the history behind Weidenhammer today. So, you started Weidenhammer 48 years ago. Who was your first customer, and how did you find them back then?

[00:01:23] John: Well, that, that's easy. it's an important part of this, the story, and the kind of the customer found me. So at the time I was working, for a company, it was called Ernst & Ernst at the time, now Ernst & Young. As a... I was a road squad consultant, and one of my clients was a company called by the name of Baldwin Hardware Manufacturing Company.

Was run by an entrepreneur by the name of Severin Fayerman, who's a Holocaust sur- survivor, came to this country, consummate entrepreneur. And one day he and I were walking through his plant and he said, "You know, John, my IT manager just quit, and I need somebody to take up that role, and I thought that you would do that."

And I said to him, "Severin, you know, it's interesting that you're asking me that because I've been thinking of starting an IT consulting business, and I thought you would be my first customer." And he said, "Really?" He said, "John, you don't wanna be an entrepreneur." He said, "It's hard work. It's seven days a week.

You're crazy. Why don't you just come to work for me and, you know, we'll settle it." So I said, "Tell you what, how about if we have a six-month trial and I'll come to work for you as your IT manager. I'll work 40 hours a week, but it can be any 40 hours of the week. And if after six months, it, you know, it's right for me to come to work for you, I'll do that.

And if it's not, you know, I'll just continue doing what I'm doing." And he agreed to that. So, I quit my job at Ernst & Young, hung out a shingle, put 100 bucks in a bank, had a customer. And the nice thing about being able to work 40 hours a week for Severin was he was there literally seven days a week, so I could work pretty much any of the seven days of the week, including nights and weekends and so forth, to get my 40 hours in, and he was good with that, and I was good with it too.

So I got to start the business, work with a whole bunch of other clients, and satisfy my requirement with him. So yeah, almost to the day, six months later after we started, he calls me into his office and he says, "So John, you ready to come to work for me?" I said, "You know, Severin, I already have a couple of customers.

I have two employees by now. You know, my die has been cast. I'm set to keep going." And we worked together for probably another three, four years before he sold, the company to a much larger company called Masco, and, we had little bit of a relationship after that acquisition. But we got launched in a hurry, and, we were off and running, and in fact the very first project that we did for Severin, for Weidenhammer as his consultant, was among the most successful projects that I've ever been associated with in my life because we built a, essentially a, what we'd call today an ERP system for them on a custom basis, and it was one of the few implementations that I've ever done where literally people that worked in jobs before were shed from the company.

I mean, not just... You know, normally they sort of wander off into the weeds and into other jobs, but literally 17 people that were doing a whole variety of jobs, of coding invoices, printing invoices, issuing quotes, doing billing, accounts receivable, those jobs just just went away, and it was a it was such a huge success, and Severin was willing to talk about what a success it was, that it became such a stellar reference for us in the early going.

And in the early going of the company, we worked a lot with IBM, and because of the success of this system, IBM started bringing us into other, engagements. So, it launched our business in a really spectacular way. And of course my... Because I had worked for an international consulting firm and had traveled internationally with that firm, I had a lot of contacts with people in the US and Canada, so it was easy for me to sort of find other clients very, very quickly.

So in a short period of time, we had a nice client list. We hired a bunch of people and, you know, that's really how things got started. But it was Baldwin Hardware that really was the first, customer. And I will say that,I've spent a lot of time with manufacturing companies, and Severin ran the cleanest metal cutting business that I've ever been in.

You could literally eat off his floor. I mean, most metal cutting businesses, you see metal chips everywhere, and you see the floor is dirty and the machines are dirty. This place was always spick and span. I mean, Severin was a kind of a clean freak, but,

 it was,an amazing experience, and he and I remained friendly.

I consider him a mentor, and he and I remained friendly until he, passed away a few years ago

[00:06:28] Jay: Did you, foresee or even, was it even part of your thought process when you guys were implementing that ERP system that it would replace those people's jobs?

[00:06:41] John: Yeah, 

that was really the intent. So

[00:06:43] Jay: was to do-- The goal was to

build a system 

[00:06:45] John: yeah. 

the, and, so we started out with that as a mission. Of course, we didn't talk to the people we were working with. Part of the point was that their jobs were gonna be eliminated. But,but it happened, and I can just tell you that I can probably count on one hand the number of times where we...

And we've implemented thousands of systems for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of companies over the, our history. And, very few, times the, do positions actually get eliminated, and people just sort of wander off into other positions. And,I mean, clearly and the hope is, I mean, sometimes it doesn't happen, but you hope to improve productivity through the implementation of new systems and processes.

But, sometimes the big saving, which is in, you know, salaries and benefits and so forth, doesn't really occur

[00:07:35] Jay: Yeah, that makes sense. Well, where did you grow up, and did that have

any impact on you being an entrepreneur? 

[00:07:41] John: I grew up in the city of Reading, a very lower middle class family. My dad worked in a factory for a company called Parrish Pressed Steel. They made automobile, frames. My mother was a housewife. her life revolved around her children. And, I have an older brother who's 10 years older than me, and he started college in the same year his girlfriend got pregnant.

So before you know it, I had a little sister because my mother took care of my niece, and my brother had, five kids in six years, with his wife. So, so there were, you know, shortly one after the other, I had a bunch of, you know, what were siblings, you know, kind of, because we had all these other little kids.

and my brother lived across the street from us, so my mother, babysat for my brother's children. And it, and,he went back to college and, his wife worked as an operator at the telephone company

[00:08:37] Jay: And but where did you get this entrepreneurial

[00:08:42] John: I, have always been an entrepreneur. I was the guy with the lemonade stand and selling stuff door to door. Probably the most significant gig that I had for four years that I'll say built a lot of my work ethic was I was a morning paperboy for four years. So I delivered a paper that is no longer called the Reading Times.

So every morning, you're a sole propriety, proprietor every morning up at 5:00 in the morning, down to the corner, get your papers, deliver 150 papers. a lot of my, 'cause I grew up in the city and the city of Reading was, essentially a mill town back then. There were a lot of men that were gonna go to work at 7:00 or had to be at work at 7:00, and they wanted to take their newspaper with them.

So if the newspapers were late or I was late, I'd... There'd be people standing on their front porch, you know, waiting for me to get their newspaper to take off to go to, to go to work. So, it was a fun job, for me, because when you're a morning paperboy, you kinda get your job out of the way in time to come home, have breakfast, and go to school, and it didn't really impinge on my, you know, playing, you know, baseball, basketball, you know, football, that kinda thing.

So it was really kind of, kinda nice. Although I must say, when you deliver papers on Friday night and Saturday, we didn't, I didn't travel with my family. So if they went to the shore, you know, I stayed home and delivered the newspapers. But it was, it... That, I'll say more than anything, that job shaped my work ethic because, you know, rain, shine, cold, hot, you gotta be there to deliver your papers and get the job done.

And of course, you have 150 people that are counting on you to, to put the paper on their front porch or, you know, on the third floor of their apartment who had a 

[00:10:36] Jay: Gotta deliver. 

[00:10:37] John: bunch of buildings. Yeah

[00:10:38] Jay: Gotta deliver. I'm not gonna dive into it, but I... My mom ran the local newspaper in our town in Virginia, and then she ran the New Kent Guide, which was basically a phone directory, I guess, in the early 2000s, and I delivered those to her customers in the middle of nowhere Virginia on back roads doing...

You know, so I lived the, that, a little bit of that experience, not the 5:00 AM, but certainly the, you, the logistics and customers, and so I, can appreciate, especially being younger, what that could have kind of helped

[00:11:09] John: Yeah, I did it from when,

I did it from when I was 12 to, to 16

[00:11:14] Jay: Yep. Yep. so who's your customer today, and how has that changed or how is it similar from, you know, your first customer 48 years ago?

[00:11:23] John: I would say that our ideal customer today, we're... Our business is kind of hyper-optimized for the mid-market. So our clients, our best clients are 50 to 500 million in that space. you know, too small to really be viewed as an enterprise, company and to be on the radar of the Accentures and IBMs and Capgemini and so forth of the world.

But big enough that they need an organization like ours that has, sophistication and a broad range of capabilities, but most importantly, a broad range of experience. So, you know, we try to stick to our our swim lane. We do have, clients that are much, much bigger than, that $500 million, cap, and some that are much smaller than that.

But the... we're the best fit for that, I'll call it, up mid-market, upper, upper end of the mid-size enterprise, market space

[00:12:26] Jay: what was the hardest revenue milestone to hit along the way for you guys? Was it a million? Was it five? Was it

10? Like 

[00:12:34] John: we, got to a million very, very quickly. I'll say it was in the 5 to 10 range. and the hardest,I'll say the hardest part or the most stressful part was getting to the point where we didn't have to worry about finances, and that came at about five years, I'd say. You know, where wasn't worried about making payroll, wasn't worried about, you know, paying back our loans, wasn't worried about failing anymore.

That was a big driver for me in the early going. You know, I knew the statistics that a lot of startups just fail and flame out, and I was absolutely driven that I didn't want that to happen to me, even though a lot of entrepreneurs fail a time or two before they have success, and they're able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and, you know, go again.

And I'm sure I would've done that too, but I was very motivated by a fear of failure in the eyes of, you know, the people that were depending on us for a job, and my family, and people that knew me. and candidly, when you start a business, your success... There, there is, there are a lot of people along the way that helped me, some in ways that I don't really understand, and I've always been just so tremendously grateful for the clients that gave us a chance, the clients that forgave us when we screwed stuff up and, the ones that propped me up and motivated us as we went along, along the way.

And, you know, just early, early stage companies can't be successful without really a great team, and I've been lucky to surround myself with super talented, people, which I'll say was one of the things that I learned, in working for Ernst & Young, was the value of surrounding yourself with really super smart people because of what they, inspire you to accomplish and be part of.

And, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs really don't like that. They don't like having people around that are smarter than them or more capable of them. And, but we've been lucky enough to attract and retain a lot of that talent and,and I'll say that's been a part of our story.

But getting back to your question, the hard part was getting to five years and feeling financially secure. We didn't worry about, you know, flaming out, financially, particularly because I'll say When Weidenhammer got started, I misgauged how big the opportunity was.

[00:15:05] Jay: Hmm 

[00:15:06] John: and I think had we had more capital, 'cause I don't come from wealthy people and, you know, typical baby boomers, you know, when I worked for somebody else, I spent every- I spent everything, so I didn't really have a lot of money in the bank.

But I had an idea, and what I was about to say is I didn't realize how big the opportunity was because had I realized that, I would've tried to have been better capitalized and not have such a long period of, kinda hand, living hand-to-mouth or, you know, almost kind of a paycheck to paycheck, mentality.

But, I was able to, despite not being very well financed, early on I was able to nego- and I had worked with banks as a consultant, so I was able to secure a relatively large line of credit. So we had, credit early on that could sustain the business through the ups and downs that any small business has.

And, so that, that helped us financially in the beginning. But like any startup, you know, you use your credit cards, you use bank debt. I remember early on,shortly after we had started in 1978, interest rates in like 1981 went up to 21%. And I started borrowing money rather than from the bank, I borrowed it from my parents and from others, and I was paying them 20% interest on the money that they were lending me because the, my bank was charging me, I don't know, like 23%.

And I thought I might as well give that kind of a return to my friends rather than give it to the, give it to the bank

[00:16:48] Jay: so, I don't wanna spend too much time talking about AI specifically, but I do have a question, around kind of the reinvention of the tech industry and the decision on what to go all in on, right? So I mean, there was like mainframes, client server, dot-com, cloud, mobile, now AI. there was decision points along the way, which one of those to go all in on.

There was a million bad bets on, you know, but people went in on that were not the right thing. how do you guys decide, like, this is what we're doing now? Like, this is the next hot... It's AI. We've talked before, and I kind of, I know that it's part of your DNA being whatever the next kind of wave of technology is, and you've already integrated that with, you know, your development teams. how do you decide that? how do you guys, like, pick, like, this is-- we're gonna go all in on this next thing?

[00:17:39] John: Well, I think I might have described to you, when we were kind of setting this up, what I refer to as our diversity strategy. So we are always looking at what's new and trying to do it or do a part of it, recognizing that, some things we're gonna be able to successfully learn, do, implement, and others we can't.

But what our diversity strategy is about is we try to be in multiple lines of business at the same time with certain of our... Because every business line goes through a cycle. You know, you have an emerging business, growth stage, mature, and then your, that cycle ends. So we intentionally, strategically try to have different parts of our business in different parts of their overall life cycle

at the same time, so that we have mature businesses throwing off cash to fund our emerging or startup businesses, and we try to have growth stage businesses that can take the place of our mature businesses when they go on critical life support and we need to exit those businesses.

So our whole goal is to embrace change as an agent of our success rather than our demise. The conventional wisdom in the IT industry is you pick a niche, you get very deep and long in that niche, and that's the road to success. And in my observation, that success road is littered with companies that get super niche-y, and when the niche changes, they don't move on.

They're not prepared to move on to the next thing. and for us, we're always trying to be prepared to move on tothe next thing. And,I... And it's not because I can't pay attention to one thing for a long period of time. It's I just, in, our core, in my core, I believe that, going with change, embracing change is the best risk abatement strategy you can be on.

the downside is it sub optimizes your success in the short run because certain things that you try to do, you just can't do. The window of opportunity closes or you don't have the right champion, the champion getting that technology or that service, stood up and running and profitable. But nonetheless, we keep, we keep trying

And,I talk to our, leaders every year when we're doing our planning and ask them, "Tell me of the different things that you're doing, tell me at what stage in their overall life cycle they are. Is it mature? Is it growth stage, emerging, startup? You know, where is it in that?" And if they don't have a portfolio of different things in their division that they're doing, we talk about that.

in fact, last year, I'm talking about 2025 now, I tasked every one of our business unit leaders with, "I need you to come up with at least one new line of business," largely because things are evolving and changing so quickly in our industry that I need them to be not just alert to nurturing or kind of, milking their mature businesses, whi- which is easy to do because you'd say, "Well, geez, this is really working.

Let's ride the hell out of this." But when you do that, you lose sight of preparing the next, hopefully the next big, big thing. So, so each, each responded with at least one thing that they were gonna try out, and some of them are still in the get off the ground stage, but others have matured, nicely and, you know, we can move forward with them

[00:21:28] Jay: it true that you keep an old collating machine in your office?

[00:21:34] John: I keep, two boards from old punch card machines in my office. One was, from a collating machine, and one was from what they called a tabulating machine.

So, a tabulating machine would so you would sort, 80 column cards into a particular sequence. and sometimes multiple sorts were required to do that.

And then you would put those cards into a tabulator. and sometimes the cards had different data in them. And then what a tabulating machine did, it would read the cards and pretty much one for one, it would print a line on a printer for each one of the cards that went into the tabulating machine.

And I have from a school district, I have a wired board from a tabulating machine that was for a payroll system. And what's more is I have the program. So I have the piece of paper where somebody figured out how to wire this board to do that particular task. And I keep it to remind me of where this whole business has come from.

And I might have told you this before, but the first company I worked for was like the Museum of Computing. It was a company called Carpenter Technology, and they, in the basement of their building, they had what they called a unit record department, which was key punch machines, verifiers, sorters, collators, tabulators, and they still use those for some of their, applications.

And there was a whole group of people that revolved around those, unit record machines. And then they had... And it was at the very end of its life. They had, an IBM 650 computer, which was used vacuum tubes instead of semiconductors to, you know, make the flow of electron electrons go where it's supposed to go.

And that didn't last very long. And then they had, an IBM 1401, which was IBM's so-called second generation computer, which was f- their first semiconductor machine, and that was in a room. and then the equipment I worked on was the IBM 360, which was really the beginning of the mainframe, and Carpenter had two.

They had a 360/25 and a 360/30. and they weren't very long-lived because we quickly got rid of the 1401 and 650 and most of the collating equipment, and we upgraded to larger 360 equipment and then subsequent, before I left, 370 equipment. But a story I always tell people that they just can't believe is I put in a requisition for memory on a 370 computer, one megabyte of memory, one megabyte.

I'm not misspeaking when I say one megabyte. And the requisition was for a million dollars to upgrade that mainframe computer

[00:24:38] Jay: full, we've come full cycle. I think we're, I think RAM is about, a million per, megabyte again, so that I think we finally got there. That's a... does it blow your mind thinking like you were standing in a, you were standing in a computer back then, and like now, like all, it's just we've...

Like, how can you even reconcile like living in that world and then living in this world where things are just

[00:25:02] John: Well, that world was so different because we, you know, 16 kilobytes was a threshold that we tried to manage within. I worked on,developing some code for an IBM 1800 computer. it was a process control, application for, melting, ingots in a in a vacuum.

And this computer had 640K, so it was like the first PC. It had 640K of main memory, and it had a 1.2 megabyte, 1.2 megabyte disk drive. And it was like a platter that you could take out and put in again. It took, like, 10 minutes for it to spin up and go through all of its diagnostics. And we made code to run in this environment, and it was mostly assembly language code because we had to, you know, we had to be super efficient at making code that could run within...

'Cause you had the, you had an operating system and all the controls and everything for the computer, and then your application programs had to ride on top of all that. And, so that was the fun, fun stuff. But it was funny, I,when I first started when I first graduated from college and started working as a developer at Carpenter, I used to tell my friends, and they couldn't believe this, that I loved my job so much that I couldn't wait for the weekend to be over so I could go back to work.

And, I truly meant that. I mean, I was just so fascinated by what we were doing. What I didn't realize was we started building this production management system, for the primary operations in this steel mill. And shortly before we went live with this application was it was... And it was one of the first online real-time, applicationsin the steel industry, was I was literally at the office seven days a week, almost 24 hours a day because on these computers, we ran production from 6:00 in the morning till 11:00 at night, and on, and that was Monday through Friday night, and the only time we could test was from 11:00 at night till 6:00 in the morning, and then all day Saturday and Sunday.

So we'd make code during the day, Monday to Friday, and then at night we'd be in there testing our programs to... because we had a deadline we had committed to, to bring this system up and live, and it just, it was you know, in, IT we talk about crunch time. This was like crunch time for several months where it was just, you know, my whole life was...

and I'll say being a paperboy and that experience, prepared me because by the time we were in crunch mode, I was in charge of the project.

And, it taught me just a work ethic that I think for entrepreneurs is important that, you wanna show your team that you're willing to do any job, that you're, you can be the first guy to get there, you can be the last guy to leave, and you're personally willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

And I've tried to live that work ethic, you know, my whole life. And,you know, I think one, of the mistakes that I see startups make is, They don't realize how hard it is to start a business, and I always tell entrepreneurs, and I've done a lot of mentoring with people that are gonna start a business.

First thing I tell them is, "If you're gonna start a business, first thing you have to do is you have to get your life in order." And what I mean by that is you gotta get all the garbage cleared out of your life, and you've gotta be... position yourself to be able to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day.

Not that you have to do that, but you've gotta be able to do that. And if your goal in starting a business is so you can go play golf every afternoon or, so you can take, you know, only work four days a week. some people, and maybe it's just that I'm not smart enough, I do know that some people get away with that, but it-- I find that a lot of businesses, startups, they run out of time more quickly than they run out of cash.

now, they... You know, we often say that most, small businesses fail because they didn't have enough cash to fund their startup period, because everybody that puts together a spreadsheet has themselves making money in the second month, and that never happened, in a business plan.

And they do run out of cash, but more than anything, they run out of time because, you know, they don't have their home life squared away. They wanna do all sorts of other things as a newfound entrepreneur, and you only have one job, and that's to make that business succeed, and you gotta clear everything out of your head.

[00:30:17] Jay: I love it 

[00:30:18] John: it's funny, people say to me all the time, "You know, Jon, you were so brave to start a business. What courage it must have taken." And I always tell them, "I was so unbelievably naive. If I knew what I was getting into, I might never

[00:30:32] Jay: Might have changed your mind. Well,

[00:30:33] John: have. I might have never-"

[00:30:34] Jay: you touched on one thing that I have a couple more questions and then we'll wrap, but I want... One thing I wanna touch on that you mentioned kind of from your testing time there, you know, developing and test. How does quality kind of live in this AI world for you guys? Like, how are you making sure, you know, with these AI tools that are coming out, that it's just as high quality as if, you know, a developer wrote it, a QA person tested it, you deployed it, you had UAT, you know, a normal traditional SDLC process. How are you guys making sure that, like, the quality of those products, while supercharges development teams, is still kind of at the level that it's always been at?

[00:31:15] John: Well, the biggest benefit I think of, AI is we are able to generate use cases, test scenarios, and test data that we wouldn't have thought of before. So we're able to get out further on the quality curve, I think, because of the tools that AI gives us, and the ability to stepwise go through application code, see results,have, you know, your AI assistant looking over your shoulder, constantly challenging the why did you do it that way?

These results don't conform to what we said they were gonna be, or what we expected they were gonna be. it's still very hard to deliver an application that is absolutely defect-free. But I'll say we used to always, before AI, we used to always test to a level that we called reasonable assurance.

And what that meant is we'd get to about 80, 85... Excuse me, about 95% defect-free, which would say if you had an application with 1,000 functions in it, 5% of them or 50 were defective. They didn't meet the spec or that they, in some use cases, they just wouldn't work. Not that they didn't work at all, but that they didn't work.

I believe we're able to get another with AI, we're able to get another sigma, you know, probably maybe 97 and a half percent defect-free, but we're still gonna find defects in, production. We try to tell our clients to have that expectation. You know, the client, of course, would like to have defect-free software, but we can't...

it's almost impossible to test every single use case completely and, you know, you and I talked about this before. Part of the problem with UAT is both the developers and the end customer kind of assume that it works. So they just try to make it work rather than try to break it. And I've said for 50 years, it's hard to make software foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

And, you know, people using a set of application code can really exercise it in ways that you never anticipated, and they break it. and sometimes... Now, we have better tools now because we can record scenarios now. we can actually watch somebody, not physically looking over their shoulder.

We can record what they're doing, and we can see where the application failed and then replay that. Because one of... And you know this as a quality guy, when, often when, an end user or, somebody doing, user acceptance testing tells you what went wrong, they only tell you part of the story.

They say, "I did A, and Z happened." And it's like, tell me that again. You did A, and Z happened?" "Yeah, that's exactly what happened." What they forget to tell you is, "I did A, and B, and C, and D, and then I didn't get the result that I wanted, so I did B, and C, and D over again. Then I did C and D over again." So it was...

So all these things happened in between, but all they remember is you know, selected a menu option, put in a piece of data, and it bombed.

and, so again, today we have better tools to exercise that. and I'll just say that the because we're able today to generate substantially more detailed requirements when we...

So we use AI to turn requirements into what we call a PRD, a program requirements document, and then we take that PRD and we turn it into a story, and that story can be ingested into... We use GitHub and Copilot to make code primarily, but, you know, we do work with Claude and, other AI tools.

but the beauty of that is if we do a good job with the requirements, and,I'm... I think I've said this to you before, it... we used to joke years ago, we would joke and say, "Okay, you start coding, and I'll go find out what

they want." And the essence of that joke is developers are most comfortable when they're making code, and they start too early. and then because they started too early, they start defending what they built. And I learned a long time ago, you should stay in requirements gathering as long as you absolutely can

before you start making code, which is one of, the flaws of agile development and running sprints, is you start making code before you really know the full extent of what the requirements are.

and then you run into the pushback from the development team of, it's almost like, "Well, the end user doesn't really know what they want. we know what they want, and we made it in the code already, so let's keep this." And that's an invitation for spaghetti, code candidly that's very tough to maintain.

And after, MVP, and a lot of... Almost nobody ever does this. Almost always after MVP, you should throw everything away and start over again to make the code. Now, it's... Today it's not as onerous as it used to be because we can rebuild the MVP

from... if we've done a good job of gathering requirements, we can rebuild the MVP and more very, very quickly.

[00:36:57] Jay: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I have one, one final question for you,

non-business related, just John being John. If you could do anything on Earth and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:37:13] John: Geez. I think I'd like to be a principal of a Formula 1 team

[00:37:18] Jay: Oh, there you go. That's an answer right there. All right. I mean, you can't fail in this scenario, so you can win all of the, I don't know anything about F1, but, all the races. are you a big F1 guy, assuming?

[00:37:29] John: I'm a fan. I'm guess- I've always been sort of a wannabe F1 guy, and,but I'm an F1 fan like I'm, an Eagles fan. I would rather watch NFL on television than actually go to a, 

go, to a game, and I'm the same way about I've been to Formula 1 races. I'd rather watch it on television than physically be there.

But what I can say, I've been in the pits for a number of races with race teams, and it's way more exciting being

[00:38:07] Jay: Oh, I can imagine- yeah, 

[00:38:09] John: making the car go

than sitting in the stands watching the cars go by

[00:38:12] Jay: Sure. I would have to... that's a... I love that as a wrap to the entire episode and maybe just, the philosophy that you live your life. John, you were fantastic. if anyone wants to reach out to talk to you directly about something they heard today, what's the best way for somebody to get in touch?

[00:38:27] John: I'd say email. My email is really simple. it's my initials. You see them on the screen, jpw@hammer.net, and that comes right, to me unfiltered, and I'll get back to you. And I'm at a point in my career where giving back is important to me because I've had a lifelong what goes around comes around kind of philosophy, and if I help somebody else, it goes around and somehow it comes back to me in ways that I usually don't understand.

But I, believe in helping people because candidly, so many people helped me along the way, and I know there's a lot that I don't even... that helped me that I don't even know about

[00:39:04] Jay: John, you're awesome. a legend in the space. I wanna do more of these at some point. Would love to just pick your brain on anything and everything Philadelphia tech history. You are awesome. Enjoy the weekend. Thank you so much for

your time being on. We'll talk soon. 

[00:39:17] John: Thanks, Jay. 

[00:39:17] Jay: Thanks so much, John. See ya. 

[00:39:19] John: Thank you 

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