The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - People-Centered Leadership with Peoplelogic.ai CEO Matt Schmidt | PPP #20

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

In "People-Centered Leadership with Peoplelogic.ai CEO Matt Schmidt / PPP #20" we hear about how Peoplelogic.ai Founder & CEO Matt Schmidt grew up in North Carolina, helped start a company while attending North Carolina State University and how he now applies his over two decades of experience to provide data-driven, but people-centric solutions for managers and leaders of companies.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the People Process Progress podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Pinnell. This is episode 20, the logic of people. And we'll see why I'm kind of calling it that here in a little bit as we talk more with my guest, Matt Schmidt, CEO of people logic.ai. And thank you again, for everyone that's listened, download, subscribe, please give us a rating out there. You know, obviously, more stars is good. Help us bump up to the top and share more great stories like we're going to get today. Talking with Matt. And so today, we'll learn about Matt, where he grew up, those kind of things. And Matt, thank you again for being on the podcast. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you this evening. No problem, Kevin. Thanks so much for having me.

Cool. So like I mentioned, the people process progress, right? So we'll learn about you, covering the people component. Obviously, a lot of process, which is great. I'm excited to have that conversation and share that with other people, all the processes you've been through and in the industries that you've been part of. And then, of course, share with folks as we make progress. So kind of jumping into it, where are you from and where'd you grow up? Yeah, so grew up in eastern North Carolina. You know, North Carolina is one of

those interesting states that has this island in the middle between the beaches and the mountains and everything in between is farming country and is flat. And so I grew up in the farming country and was driven to build a, you know, to get into technology and build a way to escape from, you know, the lack of technology and progress. And so came up to the island here in raleigh and uh went to college at nc state and uh that really kicked me off in my uh my journey nice did you so were you into so you didn't have technology maybe a lot were you were you excited about it or into it when you were younger like did you enjoy like atari or nintendo or things like that did you have kind of a you you know, an attraction to that? And I may be dated, I'm 46. So I may be older than,

older than you. No, totally, totally had, had all those things. And, you know, we had, we had dial up internet. And I can remember getting my first computer and being just intrigued by the potential of that and, you know, quickly taught myself how to program. And that was really the first way to begin escaping and started helping people build websites back when I was a teenager. And so I've always had that entrepreneur draw ever since I was really young. And that seems to have carried well for me. Did you, did you get into any particular kind of code, you know, doing websites, begging to HTML or, or just kind of a little bit of everything?

A little bit of everything early on, you know, heavily into HTML. And, you know, even before this was, you know, before there was really CSS and early into JavaScript and then quickly into building programs in BASIC and then moving into languages like Java as I taught myself more and more about how to program. In the early days, it was really driven by, funny enough, as I had an early computer and we had the dial-up internet. And one of the early things I was really driven by was, hey, we don't have Microsoft Word.

I really think I could build something like that. That was foolish of me in the early days. Wow, yeah. But ambitious? Ambition, I was never short on in my in my youth. Man, imagine that with imagine right now what, you know, we're all going through with dial up. Just people don't understand the true pain that that is, you know, when you had to have a separate phone line just so you didn't get kicked off right right um yeah that i i think i told somebody the other day gosh we had this uh pandemic during the the 80s or even

the the early 90s um how much worse it would be and you didn't get your uh free internet cd in the mail and man if you were trying to figure out how to get into AOL, right? That would be a lot. It would. That's awesome. So clearly that bug of doing that, making websites, got to NC State. And so did you major in computer science or a similar major there? Yeah, so I majored in computer engineering and electrical engineering because foolish me, I thought I wanted to actually build the parts of the computer more than I wanted to program them.

Oh, wow. Until I learned that I hated physics. Oh. I still went through with the computer engineering and the electrical engineering, but was really focused on programming and the more computer science aspect of it and was doing that all throughout college. And that was really where I found, you know, got connected with my partner at D-Zone long before it was called D-Zone. And, you know, we started to build a business together. Oh, cool. So were you, you, you met at college? Yeah. So he had a business, uh, that was, had relocated from New York and was in, uh, Cary and he was looking for, um, some people to join his team. And this was in you know i guess mid.com crash uh era and so you know i joined and

you know everything uh plummeted as you know our customers lost their customers and so on um and we had this great website called java lobby and uh we figured out how to sell ads around it and that was really the start of it as we, you know, built some interesting technology and learned how to be publishers and turn that into, you know, building one of the world's largest developer portals at Deezer. Wow. I mean, that's pioneering stuff, right? And then there weren't as many tools, right. To be able to,

that kind of wrote a lot of scripts for you or helped you along. So did you all have to do a lot of hours in front of the keyboard and mapping and work like that? Yeah, this was long before you had to build everything in those days. And so there were, you know, the early days of even things like Google AdSense and Google AdWords and those types of things. But, you know, we had to build our own community software. And so it just was, this was even probably before, this may have even been before blogs, but certainly before blogs became the place that everybody tried to put their communities.

Did you find many like-minded and skilled folks at school there? Or were you able to, again, still pretty, I guess, early-ish days, kind of reach out to other, were there user communities then that you all could kind of bounce ideas off each other as well? You know, so that's what we provided primarily. And so, you know, Java Lobby had been started by my partner and as we scaled it, but in those days, you know, the developer world was much more fragmented and Java Lobby really provided a place for developers to have an independent voice and an independent community that was separate from the vendors who were really controlling the messaging of developer tools and developer APIs in those days,

which is somewhat different than what you get these days. And open source wasn't what it is now. It was a big deal if you and open source wasn't what it was you know what it is now um it was a big deal if you were open source back then so it everything has sort of uh come much further much more quickly um than it was in those days did you um run across other folks that that also went on to kind of build products and and put stuff out that, that came through Java lobby? Yeah. I mean, it was, uh,

you know, a lot of the, the people that we interacted with went on to, to build, uh, companies that went public or had great exits or, um, you know,

people that you see in the news these days are, um, were people that we, that were part of the community and were part of that early Java community. And so it was an exciting thing to be a part of as we built out this place for people to share their problems and share what they were trying to build and be able to help each other and get the word out about what they were doing. That's, that's cool. Cause it's such a, especially then a niche and folks that really had to want to do that. I would imagine, right. To be involved and get in there and do that, not just as an entrepreneur to try and make a successful business, but that programming and that coding. And I, I dabbled a small bit in HTML mostly to make like a website. Cause I was a PC

gamer for, for like, you know, the folks I played with. So, but understanding my wife did some coding and looking at it and man, it's, I was an old school cron under the desk, like assemble and upgrade computers like that. But getting into the coding piece for me was pretty overwhelming, but also amazing. It's still amazing to me just that, you know, put these characters in there and it'll make all these things happen. And just, it sounds like to build that to put that community out there with such foresight was great and advantageous and helped a lot of people along the way. And so for me as an IT project manager, project manager in general,

what kind of, just to touch on that bit, what kind of process did you all look at when you all got together and said, hey, did you already know, hey, there's this need, we should give people this forum, this place to kind of talk code and, and do better? How did you all kind of pull that together? Yeah, so, you know, in those days, we were really just figuring out as we went, by the time we got to dzone.com and really had evolved from Java Lobby, we had much more of a process and a plan in place. And so, you know, we saw what places, you may remember dig.com and the early days of Reddit,

and they were beginning to try to provide value for developers. And what we saw was, well, they were really underserving that particular market. And so we decided to build something like that. They could integrate into our large network and be able to provide value that way as well to accelerate our reach.

And so as we grew the company from being two guys on a couch to a company of five or ten, you know, we had to begin to introduce more process. But still, we became very, we were still very agile as we iterated on the things that we were doing. That's what I was going to ask. And you, you answered it perfectly. I was wondering if, you know, that was a thing then already, you know, being agile is, you know, a lot of development is and, um, how you all did that if, if you were iterative or not, which, you know, obviously you were, and I guess with putting stuff like that together, that seems like the best way to go. Cause you're always kind of building and testing and coming back and getting approval, you know, and getting feedback. Did you also solicit feedback from folks that were

in Java Lobby and then in the D-Zone community also on the product and then help shape it based on their feedback? Yeah, by the time we got to D-Zone, we absolutely did. We had built up a community of really active contributors that we used to provide feedback when we were starting to look at new publications we wanted to launch or new features we wanted to add to the website, that sort of thing. And so, yeah, as we grew and scaled the business and got more organized about it, you know, we started to solicit more feedback from the people that we were serving rather than just going by what our gut feeling was

that day on the couch. Right, yeah, which still has value, but yeah, it's nice to hear whatever you get, real user feedback, especially there because it seems like such a focused user community that too, I imagine if you're not doing that in that space and really, I guess other spaces too, but for developers that they won't be there anymore,

I guess, right? If it's not a place for them to go or a product for them to use. Yeah, it's really, you know, you've got to provide value first and foremost. And so you have to build an audience and then the monetization follows that, right? And so we were really very focused on building a site to developers, we found that they were willing to participate in the community and then continue to be able to provide a livelihood for us. But it was really quite symbiotic in that type of community. And anytime you're trying to build the community of developers, particularly one that want to, you know,

where you're trying to make money in building that community or building a publication, your, your primary focus must be on delivering value to them first. Gotcha. And that, I mean, that sounds like, you know, from being in college to then leading a company um a good you know lesson learned and something to pass along for others of it you know and i heard you mention you know you started with what would work for us and then as it grows and scales and you know becomes obvious that it's growing then you evolve the company um focusing on on the customers thing how how did you find the transition

um from being on the team to helping you know lead the company and you know as developing you know at a pretty young age yeah it's a it's an interesting thing it all it happened over you know in the early days it happened over so many years that i don't know that necessarily recognized it um and we were really figuring it out as we went and you know some of the you know if we talk about lessons learned right the um you know figuring out as you go has its uh pluses and minuses um and certainly we could have, we probably would have stumbled fewer times along the way over the years

had we been able to incorporate some experience from other people who were subject matter experts, particularly around the organization and people and those types of things, right? Or being able to bring in experienced people into the team. You know, we had a lot of ups and we had a lot of downs as we figured things out along the way. And so that, you know, there are probably easier ways to do it

than the ways we did, but it worked for us. Yeah, I was going to say it got done and you all did it. I mean, it's pretty awesome. So it sounds like that's kind of a nugget too. Would you suggest if possible, if you have the resources to when you're starting to build momentum, when you're starting to build something, or it's already grown and it's already, you know, of looking at, okay, let's bring someone in that's kind of been either in this space or just, or just, is it more just in business in general? No, I think it's important to, you have to bring in the right people that are at the size that you're at. Right. And so I think there's a, you know, and they have to fit with you and your other founders

in particular. Um, and I think it's, you know, one, I think it's important for everybody to be on the same page about everybody's goals. Sure. Right. And so particularly as you, you know, are you guys there to build a nice lifestyle business? Are you there to build a business that you can grow to sell? Are you there to build a business that's going to be a business for life and be handed down to your children? And all of those are reasonable answers to the question of what you're in it to do, right? But it's important.

And the answer to that question may change as well, right? well right and so i think it's uh as long as everybody stays you know i think one of the most important things i would say is that everybody one you have to have trust and two you have to have communication um and so the people that you bring on in the early days in particular have to be people that you trust very uh implicitly um and one of the things that I have leaned in heavily in my people logic is transparency. And so with the people that I brought in, in the early days here, I share a much higher percentage of information with them than I perhaps would have in the past. But it helps build that trust and makes them feel comfortable with where we are and push even harder as we move forward.

That makes a lot of sense. And I know you've seen it and I've definitely seen it on every lessons learned at the end of a project or from my previous public safety life and after action report, communication is in some facet always there as an area for improvement, you know,

whether it's too much or too little, or we didn't understand to your point, like, does everybody know the goals or what are the objectives we're trying to get to collectively? Um, so that's a, a great point.

And the transparency I think is, is awesome. You know, a view as a, as a leader to, to open up like that. Cause it is a challenge. You know, if, if you're in an organization, you're not getting a lot of information or it's kind of, well, you know,

you hear a lot of, well, we'll talk about that, you know, separately. And you're kind of, everybody didn't have the right picture, right. The whole picture kind of the why to borrow kind of a, a Simon Sinek thing or, you know, other philosophies, but you know, folks aren't tied in. It's also kind of a morale thing. I would think, I think it's great that you're open to sharing so much information because it, it just keeps people feeling included, um, you know, and, and really does that. So that's, that's pretty awesome to hear.

Well, the most important thing is that everybody's rowing in the same direction. Right. Um, and you know, and to be clear i think the you know the amount of transparency probably varies as you um you know as the company scales there are certainly times where too much not everybody is able to handle uh really high degrees of transparency it causes fear and panic in some cases, if it's not back to communication, if it's not communicated clearly. And so, you know, as a leader, you have to recognize that as the company scales, you realize where you are on that transparency and trust scale and make sure that you're communicating at the level that's appropriate

for the company that you are at right now. And make sure you don't get too far out ahead of your skis as you scale. That's a great, you know, kind of situational and awareness factor, you know, or self-awareness. That's a good, a great point. So how long were you with D zone?

And then, you know, with that talking about some of those lessons learned that you've carried over to people logic. So how long were you with D zone? So we built, we started, I got together with my partner Rick back in 2001 and we sold the company in October of 2017 and then I left in May of 2019 so I guess that's 18 years Wow wow it was uh you know it was a long journey kevin it was a long journey um filled with a lot of uh a lot of excitement and positives and you know we we started working together in a downturn that you know in economic basis is very similar to what we're seeing today um and the you know, in economic basis is very similar to what we're seeing today. Um, and the, you know,

not the same in the context of, well, we can't even leave our apartments and homes, but, um, from an economic downturn perspective, you know, and jobs lost and those sorts of things, very similar, but, um, and, you know, through another downturn in 2008. And each of those gave us opportunities to create something that the world needed and that our audience needed. And so I think that that's, even while it can be challenging to find the inspiration during these times, these types of events tend to be a forcing function in terms of creativity and innovation.

And so, you know, I think for all those people that are looking out, you know, wondering whether this is the time, you know, there may be an idea that wasn't relevant or didn't have the legs because the world wasn't ready six months ago that maybe it is now because the dynamics in the world have changed particularly in how businesses and consumers interact and how they buy and how marketplaces work and all those things and so I think it's a it's an opportunity for those that are wondering whether it's a time to start a business that maybe this may be a good time that's a great point, you know, one of the things I was wondering is, you know, is there an ideal time versus like you did finding, you know, a couple of times where it's

not an ideal time, but finding a solution that, you know, people want and need. So really the timing obviously has factors, but if you can provide, you know, a useful product resource, you know, something, it sounds like you can still be successful if you focus on it and get that niche. And I think, like, you know, for the space I'm in healthcare, and in what you see everywhere, like telemedicine, telehealth now, which isn't brand new, right? But you know, a catalyst when you can't be together, I guess there's no better catalyst for telemedicine or telehealth than when you can't be together right uh so well and that was telemedicine was on its way right but it wasn't uh it wasn't growing at anything exponential until something like this right because why not um and that's i I, you know, I think there's, there is never, I don't know that there's

necessarily ever a bad time to start a business. I think, you know, it depends on your idea and whether you've researched the market and you understand what it is that, you know, who you're trying to serve and whether there's a need there and somebody is willing to buy what you have. Um, it's certainly possible it's as dangerous to be too early as it is to be too late right um and so you know i think there's there's never really a good time or a bad time to to start a business and you know it's whether you have the uh desire and the willingness to to take a risk and to be able to work your way through that.

And then again, back to deciding what type of business you'd like to have, right? Because not every business needs to be $100 million of recurring revenue software business or $1 billion of recurring revenue, software business, right? Or a billion dollar of recurring revenue. And it has to meet the needs of the, of what you were trying to achieve. And so that, that may be a consulting business that, that has you covering your expenses,

but it gives you the freedom to be your own boss and to spend more time with your family. And, uh, you know, whether you want to be able to, to, uh, be able to stay home and do your, the school with your children, that's a different, but for those of us with three children running around, um, that may not be the life goal that we aimed for, but, um, you know, so I, I think, you know, the timing is very much dependent on each individual person and, and really depends on, um, just what you're trying to, what you're trying to achieve and whether you've got a great idea.

And if you have what you think is a great idea, figure out how to make it happen. And that may be working on it at night. It may be, uh be starting a great podcast. It could be building a website. But there's never a – very rarely is there a bad time as long as you understand the risks and the other people that are involved with you understand the risks. That's a great point. And honestly, for – my first podcast was called Between the Slides. Now it's People Process Progress. For me, it was exactly a lifetime thing getting out of the on-call responder life. But I used to teach and travel and going, oh, I can sit here and still give people my two cents or give them a prep for this class I used to teach and throw it out there. And it's interesting hearing you talk about both a problem that you're trying to solve or what's fulfilling to you plus what's good for others.

Because particularly in this space, everyone looks at, oh, Joe Rogan or other huge NPR, right? Those are the meccas. But to your point, that's in the podcast world to me, like the hundred billion dollar business, which is cool and great for them. But it doesn't really help you realistically focus on what you're doing because it's so lofty. Other than going, oh, that was a good tip. Let me let me use some of that. Or, you know, you learn from every little bit.

But it's a great point of just looking at, you know, what do you want to do? How do you want to make a difference and um i think now again and with now now that we are past the mail-in cd of internet accessibility and the insane bandwidth we have um and again being a mid-40s guy i'm i'm never not amazed by the technology we have that you know our kids are just like that's's just life. We should just always have 100 megabytes. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Oh, why is the Wi-Fi sucking today, Dad? Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's really interesting because no matter what you choose to do, life is too short not to're doing with, you know, being excited about a side project or that you quit your day job to go full into a project, there's you have to do the things that light you up. And so when you're looking at, you know, what do I want to do next?

What do I want to do from starting a business? It has to be something that you're personally connected to, that you can be passionate about, and that every day you can wake up and say, you know what, I'm going to figure this out today and I'm going to build a great business. And then, because you have to be able to inspire and motivate other people to join you. And so you have to be very passionate about what you're doing

so that you can bring other people in with that same passion so that they tell other people about it. And that's the way that you get a thriving business. I imagine that's something you've seen in the industry in general of businesses that do start and they gather folks or start to, but you can tell they don't have the passion. So you can kind of get a read for that. I imagine that's a challenge. And I imagine just the variables of why someone did or didn't start something or stay with something or something like that. So that's a great point of your passion inspires others,

which I think is a great when folks want to be part of something because of like your model, and you, you know, not not just the thing, that's a pretty awesome thing. So for, you know, for 18 years, you know, you're passionate and D zone, and then, you know, time to look at people logic.ai. So from, from a lot of the lessons learned from starting that up, from looking at what's, you know, what's this, this product and this, this solution from, from, you know, all your years of experience, what were some things that you were thinking and headed toward people logic that you wanted to make sure you were focused on kind of like you had early on for giving developers a place, but looking at, you know, cause it's a manager focused solution, right. To help folks and lead

their people and other things that we'll get into that as well. But, um, what were you thinking as you look toward your kind of next passion project with people logic? Yeah, great question. And so, you know, with people logic, what we were, there were a couple of things, you know, back to lessons learned is one, I knew I wanted from the start to be surrounded by people that would inspire me. I also knew that I didn't know everything. And so I needed to bring in people who were going to be subject matter experts, whether that's around the people that knew more about the human resources world or the people analytics world or whether they were experts in sales and marketing

and figuring out how to grow a business without spending huge amounts of money or whether it's finding great developers that can build the tool with me to really take it to the next level and so you know those were the things I knew from the beginning that I could do this business I could launch this business and have it grow faster than the 18 years it took me on the last one by surrounded myself with great people from the start and being able to really take that from the ground up.

And so I think the other piece is also recognizing we're in a world now with cloud tools. And this will come around to an important piece here. As we were building our last business, we did a lot of things ourselves. We either, you know, ran our own servers or we ran, you know, ran different tools that,

that we self hosted and self managed. And in today's world, you don't need to do that. Right. And so we, in this time around, I felt very confident in leveraging cloud tools for a variety of different things. And so one of the things that we noticed at D-Zone and Devada as we

went through the years was that there was lots of information that existed within the tools that the team was using but it was largely locked into those tools and it wasn't it didn't we didn't make it easy for people to be able to leverage the the data that was in those tools to be able to manage our teams better and to build the company better and to be focused on growth and you know we tried to build dashboards and, you know, invest in tools like Tableau. And that didn't really get us where we needed to go either. That gave you a point in time snapshot of where we were going, but it wasn't predictive. It wasn't prescriptive. And so I began to see that there was this need, this ability to predict which teams and managers

were going to be successful and to be able to help keep them on the right path and being successful so that we could provide them with this beacon that would give them the ability to stay on the right path and continue to help the company grow. Wow. I mean, data-driven solutions, right? and not just for the hey here's your data points what are you doing but really to to both help performance help the company but also help the people themselves be more efficient right like here's your data here's what you're doing or not doing at these you know at these times or um the analytics of the person. And so how do folks or managers, leaders use that? Because it sounds like they can be data-driven decisions, not just if I have data on how many

calls for service we had in this area, we know we need this many ambulances or on a project, we have this many faults, so we need these things. But it sounds like it's a very holistic look at the data with the person in the middle of it. Yeah, absolutely. That's, you hit the nail on the head. So it isn't, you know, data for data's sake is useless. And so most companies are aggregating all this data and have no idea what to do with it. We're also not trying to have managers capture all this data so that they can be keeping an eye on their employees. You've probably seen all these articles about companies that are not taking random screenshots of their employees' desktops to make sure they're being productive. To me, that is destructive of a culture

within the organization. And that's not what we're trying to do, right? So what we do is we take, in aggregate, the information that organizations are gathering already from their teams and apply people science and people analytics to their personalities that we're generating, their strengths, and then use that to build prescriptive recommendations for the manager about how to better manage Jim or Sally, and then be able to push the insights and the recommendations

to where their manager, John, is going to need them. And that might be within Slack when they're headed into a meeting. It might be in their email on Friday afternoon when they're getting ready to build their status email for the team. It's really about providing just-in-time insights for teams so that they can stay on the right path. And really being the person, it's people-focused. And so it's really around that idea that you can't have a team without the people. And for companies to be their most high performing, you need to be able to have a team of great people all moving in the same direction.

That makes total sense. I mean, and convenient. You're on the People Process Progress podcast. So, you know, word one fits. But yeah, I was talking to somebody else earlier today as well. And talking about the whole notion of right, if you're not in the office, you're not productive, kind of old school thoughts, which probably everybody has seen. And then and then this shift of, you know, no one's in the office or very few, and companies are still going, yes, some have taken a hit, a lot of taking of taking a hit but you know with our technology and everything that we're using like now i mean us

you know on skype recording this and um just the ability to get work done but it's really based on the work getting done not the physical location of the person you know i think like i've seen that and you know not not that long ago really um and I'm sure others have too. Um, but now I'll be interested to see how the whole landscape changes and the balance of telework and things that it sounds like wherever my, my teams are and wherever I am as a leader, um, because this plugs into a lot of major platforms, right? Collaborative software and systems that people use now.

Yep, absolutely. And so, you know, we've seen Gallup calling it and we're calling it this next normal and it won't look the same as it has in the past for how teams function. Some people are going to be better suited to be in an office and some people are going to be better suited

to work from home. And so what we help companies do is be able to understand their people and their managers in such a way that you can help guide them along which way is going to work better for Jim. Was he most productive during when he was working from home or does he tend to work too many hours outside of, you know, what's standard? And that leads him to be suffering from burnout. Or does he just tend to work from 10 to four in the morning, and that's his best time? So, you know, I think we're going to see,

you know, we're never going back to everyone being in the offices um i just at least i don't think so um i think the world has moved to a place where we understand that people are able to be productive wherever they are and um that with the right tools and the right infrastructure you're able to to see productivity and growth um no matter where they work. Had you before the actual PeopleLogic platform was built out in your previous life or the years leading up to it, had you kind of used some of this on your own where you just kind of gathered your own data or pulled stuff together and kind of modeled this? Not with the same platform you had now, but just on your own or with the platform, early platform? This became more of an entrepreneur's intuition more so than a

model beforehand. We were never really a company that embraced work from home or remote work, although we did have a fairly large team of remote engineers around the globe. But, you know, this really became more of a, I think that there's something here. And as I dug into it more and began to, to understand this world and this market, that got me more and more excited. And so people analytics is this really interesting space where it's primarily dominated as a world where really, really large companies are able to take advantage of all the data

that they've captured. And they're using it to do all sorts of modeling and predictive analysis, but they're focusing primarily to do all sorts of modeling and predictive analysis but they're focusing primarily on hr data and most of the other tools in the people analytics space are focused on enterprises and that can be a great business but what we wanted to be able to do was build a solution that used tools that your employees are actually using so that nobody had to generate you know install new tools or

gather data from other places. We wanted to leverage the data that was already being captured and wanted to be able to make it affordable and available to small and medium businesses, primarily tech companies that were in growth mode, like the kind of company that I had before. And so that was our, you know, to the point we talked about earlier about finding your niche and, you know, being able to identify the piece. It may not be a trillion-dollar market, but it might be $100 billion or a $300 billion market. And so, you know, our niche is building a people analytics platform

for small and medium businesses. Nice. So with the managers and it plugs into their systems and being able to get kind of a proactive report, right? So if I'm a leader and probably a lot of folks have this, which I would imagine contributed to your realization, oh, this is a need, you there's different systems that don't talk to each other in the same organization, but there's stuff being reported to them in there.

So is it, you know, is it, is a leader, is a manager using people logic? Do you like, how, how does it work as a manager when it comes in there from the standpoint of, you know, I want to get like a weekly update of my team or I can just go in there and check, or is it kind of a combination of that? So you can have, you know, a regular tempo. Yeah. Yeah. A combination of it. So you can go into it at any time, but you're also going to get your, uh,

a daily email at the end of every day and a weekly email. Um, next week we're going to be rolling out, uh, our first Slack bot where you're going to be rolling out our first Slack bot where you're going to be able to leverage the data from Slack and also where we're going to be pushing those. You're going to be able to start your day by getting a recap of yesterday from PeopleLogic. And then on the go, you're going to be able to talk

with our Natural Language Insights engine to be able to get details about your team. Maybe you want to see how your team is performing based on their personality traits. And you're going to see that on the go. out next week, along with an adjustment to our pricing down to $49 a team to make it even more affordable and attractive to small and medium businesses. Wow. That's awesome. You mentioned some of the analytics people, analytics and systems, HR focused. And when you were speaking of it, I kind of thought that direction, but also wondered

of the folks you bring on the team and with the human resources aspect. And I imagine, you know, the other looking at people, have you found that folks that have gone to school for HR or have worked in the HR space that the trend? Because it sounds kind of like an IT HR hybrid focus, right? That they're doing that in school more and then, or just the industry is doing that more. The industry is moving that way. And so, you know, LinkedIn just recently did a survey of their audience or their HR professionals last year or early this year.

And people analytics was one of the four or five key trends to be looking at for, for 2020 and into 2021. So, you know, HR professionals are having to be more data driven and more technical. They still aren't to a place where they have the budget authority to be able to put these systems into place in most cases, but they do need to be, as their responsibilities grow and they're focused on not just providing compliance and benefits, but being able to be focused on growing the employee experience and having that encompass both the engagement of the employee, but also performance of the employee and the productivity,

they need more tools to be able to stay on top of that and to be effective in their jobs. So no, it's not something that's necessarily driven towards HR professionals being the ones that are leading this in large orgs. It's a lot of finance people, a lot of analysts, those types of things. But as it becomes an important component of HR's job to understand how their teams are behaving and how they're performing and have that be incorporated to the culture of the company, they're going to have to play a more active role in people analytics. I was going to say, oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, go ahead. I was going to say, it sounds like with, again, people focused, but having this data, but also can, particularly to the point of providing insight into burnout, you know, for the hard chargers that are kind of hard chargers to a fault, you know, where it's like work, work, work. It sounds like it could also, you know, a byproduct, probably not accidental is, you know, employee retention, obviously work-life balance, but it seems, you know, which is right up, you know, the HR and finance alley, right?

So, so turnover and things like that. It sounds like that's a great, you know, a byproduct of being able to look better into your, your people and what they're doing and help, help steer them in the right direction. No. And that's, you know, one of the things that we wanted from day one with people logic was to be able to build a platform that didn't forget about the culture. And so we wanted to make sure that the insights and the recommendations that we're providing to teams was not counter to the culture that they were building inside the company. And I think that's really a very important part that, you know, the culture of a company, particularly

when done right, can really help accelerate it. it's part of what recruits people it's part of what keeps people and so we want we fully believe that it's possible to incorporate this data-driven management into how companies run and still maintain a positive company culture. So is that with that focus, if for the clients you have, so you have a client and you're helping them get started with this, is that part of the discussion you all have of being able to share, here's ways we found that this is integrated in the organization, that it's beneficial, that is helpful and hears ways to the point earlier of data just for data or data? Because you could use data and it's a negative effect, right? Look at what you're not doing, this kind of thing,

but all in how you use it. But do you also kind of help strategize how to incorporate the tool? And also, it sounds like it's not just a tool, it's kind of the mindset and philosophy to help those organizations? Yeah, absolutely. And also it sounds like it's not just a tool, it's kind of the mindset and philosophy to help those, those organizations. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, one of the things that every customer gets a couple of weeks in is a session with our team about the recommendations that we've generated, some of the insights that we've generated for them. And we talk about how to best put those insights into practice.

And so we're there to kind of handhold you as you get the insights. And some of them are very straightforward, like, hey, you really should be having a one-on-one with your team. Others of them are, you know, hey, we noticed that Jim is working more than usual outside of his normal time, you may want to consider giving him a half day, or maybe this engineer hasn't been participating in code reviews. And so each of these are different types of recommendations that we want to help at least our primary contact,

and we're certainly happy to talk to their managers as well that to help guide them in this conversation but we want to help every company that comes on board to put into practice the things that we recommend and do that in a healthy way so we're going to encourage them to to have a conversation with us that says okay here's how we would recommend you have this conversation. But, you know, let's talk about what it looks like inside your culture as well. As a project manager who is usually probably on your client side, right, working with a vendor coming in, it's great to hear. And I found that it's so helpful early.

I mean, relationships are really everything to, you know, between me as the PM on a particular project and then my counterpart or the point person, you know, with the vendor or the solution that we bring in to really get that relationship going well. And, and I find it really valuable when, you know, our partners, cause I look at it at that, right. And you've probably seen it where sometimes that initial relationship is rocky. And, you know, there's your team and my team, and not just, hey, it's one team, let's work together, that kind of stuff. But,

but the the openness and the willingness to provide examples and lessons learned, I think, is invaluable. And it helps, you know, I know, it helps me, but helps organizations really adopt and build that partnership and understand, just here's the product, good luck. That holistic piece, that relationship building provides so much value in both, yes, getting a product to work well, but also looking at here's some real examples of where we've seen improvement or, you know, to your point, the actual strategies for, you know, teams and things that sounds like a really hopeful approach and a great open view of it. Well, we hope so.

And, you know, we come from an enterprise software world where the relationship was a big component of the selling process and the retention process. And so, you know, we've tried to bring a little bit of that white glove treatment to our SMB world as we've launched this company. Nice. And definitely looking at the website, the PeopleLogic website, looking at engineers, sales, and, under some of the things. So, but it sounds like it could really work for anyone that's using, you know, that's

inputting data in systems that leaders can then look at, you know, throughout those, you know, small to medium businesses or folks that are growing. Fitch, each of those, how did, um, you know, look at the engineer sales and support? How does people logic look at those, those kinds of three categories in particular? Yeah. So those are categories of people who tend to use a lot of tools. Uh, and so there are also teams where the managers are probably looking at a variety of different tools in any given day. And we tend to clump our recommendations together depending on the type of team as well. So we're not going to make a recommendation that's better suited for an engineer to a salesperson.

But there are plenty of recommendations and insights that you can capture that are applicable to any team, no matter what the type. And so, yeah, it's any company that uh you know giving the managers the and the executives and everybody is our longer term goal is to be able to uh democratize this the access to the data that we're providing to the employees as well um but the the ability to uh lead from the front foot and have the insights they need when and where they, they need them so that they can go into any situation prepared and not stumble because they lack the information to make the right decision. That, that makes great sense. There was, I was fortunate to work.

I was an EMS planning captain in the city. So did some field work, but mostly like special event planning and scheduling for the system. And so similar to kind of using data to look at performance, but looking at like call times and how long you were here and you know, how many of this did you do? It's, it definitely, you know, the times one, if, if you don't have that in real time, cause we would have to pull data and, you know, have these huge spreadsheets and do all this. And it's neat. But again, starting to look at how do I do this, not just right before your review, you know, when it's a proactive tool for everyone.

And that was a tough balance. with all the data that that you know discussion again of of keeping the people the person rather central of you know sometimes just the data does have to speak for itself you know in some discussions with the person in front of you but it it is an interesting balance of of using that and and how they're working and and having those and i guess that's where their kind of relationship comes in as well. Absolutely. And, you know, we're really, we're focused on, you know, long term being able to provide a tool that takes the bias out of these interactions. And so too many managers are biased towards their gut feelings or, and sometimes that can be good, but in a lot of cases it can also be bad, particularly when you're dealing with recency bias or you're friends with someone. Uh, and we want to be able to provide, uh, managers and teams and employees the ability

to have an honest conversation, whether it's in a one-on-one or whether it's in a review, without having to spend hours and hours getting prepared. And so we want to make the whole process more effective because right now companies are still doing performance reviews quarterly, if they're lucky, annually at a must, and they're still basing their comp increases on these reviews. But the fundamental process of these performance reviews is broken. And so we believe that through using the data that's in these tools, we can provide companies with a better view into how their teams are performing

and have that fit in with their culture and be able to, to build higher performing teams. That sounds great. Now we'll just have to get an easy button for how to have that review when you are the leader and your friend is working for you. That's, that's a, I'll tell you what, that's when I was in the Navy and you know, you promote and not everybody promotes at the same time or in private industry. Uh, boy, that's, that's a challenge even, even with some, some, you know, some, some clear data and stuff, but, but at least having that there is it takes, you know, some of the argument away cause it's not to your point. Like I, I can't bias this because it's actually your work,

not a bullet point that I wrote about you. Exactly. Or that they wrote about themselves, right? Yeah, that's true. That's true. The age old, evaluate yourself. The self-review, exactly. Yeah, I think we were talking the other day about the Luke Skywalker's performance review.

Yes. Folks who are listening, just about the Luke Skywalker's performance review. Yes. Folks are listening. Just look up, like, Luke Skywalker performance review meme or something. And for me, showing my age again, I don't know if it's a meme. It's actually a comic strip. So would people consider that a meme? I don't think so. It's just a comic strip, I guess.

But it's interesting. These days, if it's on the internet, I'm not sure there's a difference. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Don't need to get too specific. It's just funny. So folks should check it out. So for us coming up on an hour, good stuff.

I think for the folks that are out there, I think it was very helpful to learn. There's not necessarily a perfect time to start something that you're passionate about, you know, like you mentioned, which was really great, really, really well said. What would you say as far as someone, you know, to make progress, they're just getting started in a space or they're kind of working into space to get them, you know, to where you got to be successful to build a company so they can make progress. And then kind of a second to that is, what is your overall hope for PeopleLogic to help people and organizations to make progress?

So to your first point, and particularly if we're talking about people looking to start a business, I think, one, identify a need and identify a market. But two, don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. And get something out to market and then iterate on it so that you can make shifts as you see what the feedback is from people who are actually using it.

It'll benefit you way more than sitting there, uh, you know, trying to figure out exactly what the market wants or what your mom wants or your dad wants. Uh, get it out in the hands of real people and don't be afraid of the feedback that comes,

um, from those real users. Use that to improve your product. so that's what I would, that's what I would that's what i would advise there isn't ever a bad time or a good time to start a business as long as you uh understand the risks and you understand what it is that you're aiming for and um you know and then just build something get it out there and then keep iterating um that's always served me well. For PeopleLogic, we want to be the tool

that companies that are small businesses turn to to be able to keep their teams on track and performing optimally. We want to be able to bring this world of data-driven management and people analytics and apply that to to this small business world and be able to help companies provide a great employee experience and that starts by building you know helping the manager understand their people better and building high-performing teams and so that's's really, we want to be the choice

when people think about, hey, I need to get insights about my teams so that they can keep performing well as we grow. And we want to be that choice. That's a great thing to focus on and help with. So for folks that are interested, how could they connect with you? And then how could they connect with PeopleLogic?

Where should they go to do that? Absolutely. So they can always email me, Matt, at PeopleLogic.ai or Twitter at MPSchmid, S-C-H-M-I-D. That's a long story about why the T is missing on that one. Tweet him and he'll tell you. Exactly. And then if you're interested in people logic, go to the website at people logic.ai.

That's awesome. Matt, thank you so much for, for your time, for being on the show, for the, for the work y'all are doing, you're focusing on. That's such a great, you know, a great way to look at helping businesses grow and just really take care of people. It's just a, you know, a great way to look at helping businesses grow and just really take care of people. It's just a, you know, a great model, I think, for business in general, and just, you know, for humans. And I think the, you know, again, I think all this technology, all the data, all the systems we have can be used for so much good. And sometimes they're, you know, we've, we've seen all the stuff, the junk that's out there on the web and here and there. So it's great to hear about a product

that's, you know, focuses on the people and pulling stuff together and helping everybody, you know, make that make that progress together as an organization. And it sounds like in the future individually as well. Absolutely. That's our goal. and thank you so much for having us today absolutely cool well thanks everybody for for listening again reach out to Matt we'll have links in the description and the show notes so you all can click on those if you choose to go to iTunes Spotify blueberry all the different platforms again please if you'd like to, please subscribe, give us a rating, and then we'll look forward to hearing more in the future

about how PeopleLogic's going and kind of what's happening there. It's very exciting. So thank you again, everybody. Take care. Bye.