The Pomp Podcast - #525: Gary Hoberman on No Code for Enterprises

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

Gary Hoberman is CEO and Founder of Unqork. Gary was formerly Executive Vice President and CIO of MetLife. In this conversation, we discuss automation, creativity, the no code movement, financial services, how recruiting will change, and why no code is the future.  ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 150,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Gary Hoberman is the CEO and founder of Uncork. Gary was formerly Executive Vice President and CIO at MetLife. In this conversation, we discuss automation, creativity, the no-code movement financial services how recruiting will change and why no code is the future i really enjoyed this conversation with gary and i hope you do as well before we get into this episode i want to quickly talk about our sponsors first up is my friends over at okx crypto moves fast and many crypto focused companies can't keep up crypto exchanges that cut through the noise are

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which pays you up to 8% back instantly and comes with amazing perks at Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions, along with airport lounge access for you and a guest at hundreds of airports around the world. And of course, the Crypto.com Visa card gives you all of this with no annual or monthly fees to worry about. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com app today using code POMP, or you can use the link in the description. Crypto.com, go and use the code, get 25 bucks and use their new Visa card. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 150,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down each complex topic into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various

aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, that's Pompletter.com. All right, let's get this episode with Gary. I hope you enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i've got gary here with me thank you so much for doing this sir

thank you for having me on anthony it's a pleasure to be here for sure you are uh deep deep deep down the uh no code rabbit hole we're gonna get to that in a minute but uh you before this had a very long storied career in the traditional finance uh industry so walk us through kind of what you did uh before you started uncork yeah i mean if i go way back and we could do the wavy lines would be literally back in fifth grade, Queens public schools, the days you could actually leave school and go home for lunch, which I can't even imagine my kids leaving school and going home for lunch. So in those days, I used to walk out of school myself with great and walk to my father's publishing business, which was a few blocks away in Queens. And I would sit and play

with punch card machines, index my comic books. And then the next year in sixth grade, he had Pascal and Fortran. And I was loving this idea back then that I could communicate and make a machine do something, the art of the possible. What could you do if you could imagine it? And that's kind of how I grew up in life, which was, could I actually continue to go down this journey of communicating with machines in different languages that someone cryptic made up that looks like ancient Greek? And instead of doing the entrepreneurial work like my whole family had done, I actually said, wouldn't it be exciting to work on Wall Street? I got the Wall Street bug. And I'm a New Yorker by heart, stayed in New York my whole time through college. And then,

of course, Wall Street was a natural progression. And I spent about 20 years on Wall Street creating technology solutions, communicating with machines to do trading, to do execution, to do mutual funds, sales performance, accounts receivables. And just, again, the art of the possible was always what I love to do. I had about six patents in financial services. Five of them are still in production today for Citigroup, a Fortune 50 company where I worked. And then I joined another Fortune 50 company in MetLife as global CIO. And I walked into a role in 2012 with 10,000 developers in 47 countries, spending over a billion a year. And going back to where I started, what I missed when I started that role and what I missed even in Citigroup was the art of the possible seemed

like it was gone. So the days when you would sit there and create a solution for a business and solve a problem, it seemed like we were spending more and more money with less and less output coming out. And it wasn't just me. You'd hear from my peers in the industry, all the consulting groups would say 93% of the projects being worked on fail to deliver any value. So Anthony, If you're in business, you talk about two metrics to the board. You talk about, and I've done this hundreds of times, you say, are we delivering on time or on value, on dollar, basically? And that's what they call it.

It's on time or on budget, two things. And it means nothing. It's like walking into a furniture store and saying, hey, I like the couch and I'm going to buy it. It's, yes, it's $12.99. I'll purchase $12.99. So that's the price I paid. And I want it shipped next week and it arrives next week.

And it gets into your house and it doesn't fit. And it's just the wrong couch. and it's just, you're miserable. The reality, what I saw in technology for 25 years before creating Uncorked was the business was pretty miserable as to what was coming out because they didn't know what they needed until that couch walked into the house. And when it walked in, it was too late. So the metrics of on time and on budget mean nothing. And that's created Uncorked to basically to fix the world, let's call it. And just a small little challenge there, we're going after a $500 billion total addressable market. And that's the start.

We'll go above that after, but that's kind of where the journey's been on. That's awesome. And so you guys are in the no-code business. What the hell does no-code mean? So I love the question because everyone's like, there's code somewhere. Show us the code. Show us where it is. And the reality is I have a team of engineers.

I've got about 100 of the top engineers I've ever met in the world. And I worked with 400,000 people at Citigroup and 70,000 at MetLife. And we collected about 100 of the best engineers across all industries. they code there's no question that they're coding but what they're coding looks to a user what we call a business engineer is the term we came up with as a legal block and so it's they're coding and basically hiding the code from someone to say oh you want to basically do a payment using stripe i mean what an amazing story this week on stripe and the results you want to use stripe to basically get a payment for a new subscriber in your company you could drag in you know a text

box for first name. You could drag and stripe as a component. We already work with them and integrate with them. Oh, you want to use your bank account for implied. And all these components, we code the reusable component that you'd simply drag and drop in. So it's a visual designer tool. And what's different about us than a Wix maybe, which is no code. Wix is no code and people have been using it for a long time for building websites, is what we drag and drop could replace the most complex trading platforms, transaction systems, 20 million transactions of second type systems, exchanges. At this point, we look at financial services where we started and public sector and healthcare. And we look at these sectors and say, we could basically handle

100% of what they're doing today with code without a question, with the most complex use cases you could imagine, without anything more than dragging and dropping. And so no code specifically is there's no ancient greek there's no and for the first time you're getting scale at it and we don't generate code we don't let you inject code and which goes against all principles everything that's out there today and all the technology is supporting engineers coding we're basically saying it's a whole new way to create software it's really what you're doing is if somebody uh kind of uses a consumer example something like a squarespace i want to build a website i don't know how to code. I can go in, I can drag and drop, I can add functionality. Really what I'm

doing is kind of taking these containerized snippets of code and I'm adding that functionality kind of as I see fit to my customized needs. But really what's happened is it was almost like the code was pre-written for me. And therefore I can just use that to do it without having to have the technical knowledge to actually write the individual code. Is that fair? It's very fair. That's exactly right. Yep. So as you think through this, most people know Squarespace. They know other sorts of what I'll call consumer-facing technology, right?

Things that I want to build that have maybe not mission-critical elements to it. But my understanding is what you guys are doing is you're building these no-code solutions for some of the most important software and some of the most kind of mission-critical software for our business and for very important, large businesses. And so how does that change the way you think about building some of these no-code tools, how reliable they have to be, how resilient they have to be, and just how, frankly, usable they have to be from a user experience standpoint inside these large organizations? Yeah, actually, so the words are faster, better, cheaper, what we always hear. So, Anthony, if you were in a corporation, you would hear, and you were my business partner, and you'd say, Gary, I want you to build this great onboarding system to onboard new customers to our bank, and it should be fast and efficient. And I basically would look at you and say, that's great.

Do you want it faster, better, or cheaper? Choose two. So what we did was very unique. When we said no code means no code you could inject, no code you generate. Really what we're saying is scale and applications for the first time, which means that you're on the same version of code. So you start building today. I'm going to make this up.

You're going to start building an onboarding solution today for your customers using OnCore. You're going to be using technology on the same version of software as every major bank, every major financial institution, every hospital, every healthcare provider and insurance company. You're starting where they already left off, which is the entire difference, fundamental difference between us and everything before us. What I mean by that is you could take any solution today. Take a CRM package, which is simple. Everyone's been talking CRM software as a service for years and years.

They provide CRM as a simple base, and then you code on top of it, which means if you needed a CRM and your partner needed a CRM, you're both starting from 50% and you're coding 50%, and now you're locked in to a technology, and you're not getting the benefit of what your partner did versus what you did. And basically, you could separate that into divisions of a company. Every company division is starting with ground zero, and they're not benefiting each other. They're not benefiting the company or the industry. What we did was we said, look, no one else could code but us.

That's it. We're the ones coding the components. And what it does mean is that when a new business requirement comes in, for example, someone needed a slider to be able to do a loan. We built loan software to do loans. We built the rent relief software just launched as a product last week. And so a slider is something you see on the screen. When you build a slider, someone needed it.

when we created that component slider, every customer automatically got it because they can't inject code. So they're guaranteed to work on the latest version of software. They're automatically being upgraded. There's no more legacy. There's no more, hey, you're using Java, you're using C sharp or C plus or any other code out there. It's gone. It's basically, you're guaranteed to be on the same version of software, which means that you're going to benefit from the community of users all on the same platform, all testing, all cybersecurity testing and pen testing the same software. That's what no-code means to us. That's exactly what it means and the difference for us. So how does this change kind of the software development process? So inside of an organization,

obviously, I still have software engineers. Now I have these no-code tools. How do I change the way that I build products? Yeah, it's a great point. So today, if you step into an organization and say, hey, how are you building software today? You're going to have a business analyst that writes a Word document. They're going to give it to an engineering team who's going to work with a chief architect to come up with a schematic, a blueprint and here's the technology we'll use and the integration points. They'll start coding and you'll develop test plans off to the side. And the test plans will be based on what the business requirements said. The test plans will start and basically find out that technology after

a year of coding didn't deliver what they thought they'd get. And this is in what we call the waterfall approach, traditional waterfall approach. And then at the end of the year, technology would become lawyers. I've done it. When you become an attorney, you're like, well, business. Let me show you, this is what you said you wanted. This is what I did. You didn't tell me you needed a button on the screen to submit and save. So we didn't put a button on the screen to save so the application doesn't save. That's what's happening today. I know that's a little bit extreme. On the agile approach, which I was one of the first pioneers of agile in large corporations and the idea of moving faster in the businesses at the table, it's really good for

delivering incremental value, but it gets to the point that we celebrate success. Hey, we built this. And as a business partner, you go, but it doesn't do anything. It's not yet what I need. I needed that other stuff that's in the backlog. So with Uncork, what we've done is, if you think about coding, we replaced the coding aspect. And now business users could be technologists. The people coding could be. The reality is the person writing the Word document could now do 80% of the work in Uncork without any help. They could actually start to configure the screens and the rules and the integrations, and they could do the design. They then work with a technologist to do that last piece all in Uncork, the integration mapping, the data mapping to

the legacy systems, to the core systems, the books and records, all the complexity around that that's done inside Uncork, not outside as a unified platform. And the reality is what we're finding is we're shortening the coding time. We're 200 times faster than a Java developer. We could sit down and show you. If a Java developer was taking this long to do it, we're 200 times faster than that. Overall, because you're still doing requirements gathering, you're still doing testing, you're still doing test plans, you're still, most importantly, the business is changing requirements on the fly throughout the entire program. And that's expected. So all that results in we're finding about a three times faster agile project. Agile as in it's going to be incremental. Let's go as fast as we can.

And there's no risk to deployment, no risk to change. If you didn't get it right the first time, we'll get it right the second time immediately here. That's what's different. It's also resulting in three times cheaper is what we're hearing back from customers than anything they've seen. So that's three times the metric no one's ever achieved in technology before. You heard 30% better or 50% better sometimes, but three times. But most importantly, Anthony, what we've actually now done, we came up with what we call a line of code equivalency. So if you were going to code this a traditional way with JavaScript or Node or HTML or whatever you're going to use, we actually came up with a way to take an uncorked app and generate the estimated lines of code it would have taken.

And so in today in production, we're running for customers, you know, 80, 90 million lines of code equivalency already with 350 million lines of code in UAT and about a billion lines of code equivalency in staging, but all going through to production. But we were able to use that to estimate defects. And a defect, people don't talk about defects, but for every like 50 lines of code, there's one defect traditionally that's available there. I mean, squiggly brackets are hard to get right and semicolons and it's names and everything's case sensitive for those who don't know. It's hard to code. I mean, I look at banks that talk about – you can read about banks telling that they're going to train their traders on Python. And I look at that and I'm like, you want sympathy from them. You're trying to basically create sympathy.

It's nothing to do with productivity. It's like you want them to feel bad for you because it's hard to code. That's not what this answer is. But reality is it's hard to that one line of defect, one defect for every 50 lines of code is an estimate where 600 times higher quality. So the faster, better, cheaper, it's three times, three times and 600 times higher quality. That's the difference that we bring to the table versus everyone else in software today, every other company out there. So when you think about the differences that you're making, it's really on the back end. It's in the software development process. It's in the integration into the business.

do the users of the software, if I'm somebody who's signing up through that payment flow, if I'm somebody who's leveraging it as an internal or external customer, do I tell any difference between code that was kind of custom written versus the no code product? No. So we are so proud to be invisible to the world. So you might be using us in a bank today. You might be using us in healthcare. You might be using us in public sector or insurance. We're completely invisible. You'll never know Uncork exists. There was a really cool charity I joined as an advisor called PlayOn, where they performed CBS. At the end of the year, last year, there's a primetime special we put on with all the best music stars, Jon Bon Jovi and others.

The entire site called PlayOnLive.org is 100% on Quark. And you would never know it's there, except we put, for the first time, Powered by On Quark. It's the first stamp we ever put on any site, because it was a charity that we helped create. But you'll never know it's us other than that. And so the idea is we're a platform to create software. No one ever should know that we exist. You shouldn't know we're storing your data. We're encrypting your data.

We're doing it in a way which the banks trust us with their customer data when they wouldn't trust any other technology. And because we come from that world, we understand that world. And so with that, it's done very differently. We don't exist. We take on your experience, your user experience. So in some cases, Anthony, like so New York City, I think it's the best case, you know, how fast we can move. So you've used as a consumer, you used products like GoFundMe and Seamless Web before. I guarantee I'm on those products both all the time. Great consumer products.

here we are we had a new york city call from the commissioner come on march 6th last year and said how quick could uncork stand up a covid tracking system to track all 20 million tri-state residents that might call 3-1-1 and all consumers who want to self-report symptoms because this covid thing's coming and this time was we were joking before the call i think but like this time i was just coming back from presenting at montgomery south in california i was coming back to la there was people wearing masks. And I thought they were crazy. I'm like, what's going on here? So we actually received the call on Friday at 5 p.m. On Monday morning, we demoed a production ready secured system that already went through pen testing, vulnerability assessment, performance

assessing to handle all 20 million requests. And we became the system of record. And we basically worked with New York City to deploy that within that week, which is unheard of to go without one line of code. And then what happened was it succeeded. And this is typically why we have like 145% net value retention rate, which is incredible. It succeeded. And we have a call to say, how quick could you create a donation tracking system like GoFundMe? So we created with them, we enabled New York City to create on our platform. Within three days, they created GoFundMe equivalent donation site to collect $150 million of donations without one engineer And the coolest thing was, and this is what I get to tell my kids about, which was, you know, they came back and said, we need to get food to senior citizens.

And if you were in New York City, which you were, if you ever saw a National Guard loading a box into a taxi at any point, there's all these hubs in Brooklyn and New York City. And that was powered by Encore, 100%. We basically created the equivalent of SeamlessWeb, the company. And New York City created it on Encore. New York City was able to hire about 18,000 delivery drivers that were unemployed to basically deliver food to seniors in need. And I think the number I heard was it delivered 75 million food orders, 75 million. So whenever I see on Amazon, which was like we delivered 14 million meals, we actually enabled 75 million meals in just a few months that it was there, which to me, software, it's back to the art of possible. It's got to enable us to live a better life.

I feel like software today is like middle school years with acne. It's uncomfortable. You walk into a hospital or a doctor's office, you're given paper and a pen still today. How does this change the recruiting? When I start to think about exactly what you're talking about here, normally, if you wanted to build this type of reach, this type of efficacy inside of any software-related company, you'd have to go hire not a hundred engineers. You'd probably have to hire even a thousand or 2000 engineers. So not only are you at Uncork not having to have as big of a team as maybe you would have had to have, but also then you're going to these companies and you're saying, hey, we can actually lessen your dependence on kind of your core engineering team, those with

the software skills themselves. And so is this something that becomes prevalent enough to actually make a dent in recruiting where the software engineers, they're still valuable, but now there's this like business engineer position that becomes super valuable? Or how do you look at that from a personnel standpoint and the impact of the customers that you guys serve? It's amazing. I think so. I come as a CIO, right? So I actually ran Fortune 50 technology groups my whole life. We're selling to the business about 80% of the time today. And so the business is basically saying, we need a solution. We have never seen a solution. We've been waiting years for the solution. This is the solution. I could get it in three weeks,

four weeks and i'm done so a lot of times that's actually how we see the sell now with that said um you could look at our investors goldman sachs little series a they were an investor before you know capital g with google little series b blackrock little series c we have um when you look at our clients that we talk about like liberty mutual was our first client ever and it's a fort you know fortune 100 company and you look at mamani's medical center is our first healthcare company provider, and they're the largest employer in Brooklyn, we always started with the most complex and biggest companies to solve. So everything else is easy. In those cases, I mentioned the technologists realized that their value is to deliver technology as fast as they can

to the business. And they're visionary technologists who say, I know that if you could do this, you could do 90% of what I do today, then I could devote 100% of my engineers to something better than they're not doing today. So I definitely, there's no shortage of engineers. Anyone saying a shortage of engineers, it's just the wrong technologies. That's what it comes down to. However, I also wouldn't say that we're going to be the cause of 50,000 engineers in a bank to disappear tomorrow, because the reality is those 50,000 engineers in a bank could be creating the new algorithms that we can't even envision yet. And what's the art of the possible if you were able to take someone who's moving a button around the screen and has a master's degree in computer

science with 10,000 hours. What if you took that person, him or her, and made them responsible to build a new algorithm to detect fraud or detect? That's what they should be focusing on. So the way I see it is we're empowering the engineers to basically take on bigger and better responsibilities, freeing them up to do things they should be doing instead of what I would call the misery that they're loaded down with today. Well, this is the whole idea that basically machines will replace all the rudimentary kind of elementary tasks that we have. And what it does is, you know, as it has done many, many times over the history of human existence, is it will free humans up to do the more creative, harder to replicate type work, right? So whether you look

back and you say, hey, farmers, it used to be like 90 plus percent of the population had to be farmers. Well, now we've got kind of the mass production of food. And so that freed people up, but didn't make them not be able to make a living and freed them up to actually go do more creative things that machines had a harder time doing. And so that's essentially what you're saying here is Uncork is going to remove a lot of the elementary or repetitive type work. And instead, those same engineers now can go do the more complex things that maybe Uncork hasn't gotten a chance yet to build with no code. Absolutely. I always tell the story of like, I guess it's the 1500s when a queen was presented by an inventor of the new sewing machine called the yarn you know and she's

like what are all my what are the people doing this today going to do for work so she exiled him to paris to die in poverty where he did and that's a true story like in reality that it's time to move forward with this because for 30 years i still look back at the punch card machine i was indexing comic books on or the pascal and fortran nothing's changed it's still even with all the discussion of cloud computing. Cloud computing, it's amazing. It's scaled at the infrastructure level. It made infrastructure a software problem. That's it. The reality is you're still coding. The cloud computing companies are still saying, host your code in our cloud. They're not saying, here's a way to get rid of the code. And so it's time for a shift because

we make cloud computing irrelevant. We host it for you. The database is done for you. There's no more security. There's nothing else to worry about. It's just, it's all out of the box. Got it. And so when you start to think about kind of the big challenges moving forward, what are the biggest obstacles you guys face? So number one is this, the category that was created years back, low code, no code. Absolutely every company that's 15 years old is suddenly rebranding themselves and remarketing themselves to be in this category. And the category itself is not defined properly because the category has historically been plagued by a concept that if you enable the engineer to code, that's a feature that's needed. And that was true 10 years

ago, 15 years ago. The reality is we've proven that it's not true anymore. It's actually the harm. So I would say this whole concept of categorizing software and fitting software into buckets is incorrect. And it's kind of like the iPhone. The iPhone was a divergence convergence device. And the first iPhone reviews were horrible. I mean, they were literally like, this guy's nuts. No one's going to use this device. We're kind of at that point right now where everyone's rebranding themselves as a smartphone around us in many ways. And reality is we're saying everyone's looking at the wrong category, where actually it's not just a tool in a tool vault for an engineer to do what they did yesterday, do it tomorrow.

It's to free up the engineer to do something completely different. So to me, it's around that categorization is what I'm really fascinated by. And that's where I'm really interested about what we enable in the future, Anthony. So my view is I left the corporate world to basically fix it. It was what can we do once we actually fix the problems out there and what I experienced. To me, it's about imagine if data quality was perfect and it was entered only one time. That's it. And everything worked.

meaning you were born and your son or daughter was born in a hospital and on cork was the system of record used to create the birth certificate. Immediately, I should be able to go to your insurance company and say, hey, you use an insurance. We're going to add your daughter to the policy. And by the way, would you like a Gerber life insurance policy? And by the way, would you like to add them as a beneficiary to your will? And by the way, would you like, and I could continue that journey to say the congratulations, they got a driver's license. Would you like us to add them to the policy here, the insurance? You bought a home.

Would you like? And I just think about how disconnected the world is right now. And the data, I mean, there's nothing more than the pandemic to show us how we are not digital. We are definitely in seventh grade with acne as far as it goes in technology. And that's what we're excited to change. When you think out 25 years from now, is everything no code? Where does this go?

what does that world look like so i'm hoping it's five years out but 25 it's going to be interesting to see i i'm 25 years we gotta have jets in cases come on like that's i'm waiting for like the jets in case you open them up you jump in and you can fly somewhere um i keep waiting for that day and uh my youngest eight-year-old says he's going to invent the real flying car and it's going to be powered by lightning i love this idea but uh that's what i'm hoping 25 years is. But reality is, as it comes to code and no code, even in five years from now, I would hope that we start to look back and look at a company and say, first off, what are you doing to address your legacy? So Uncork is the first solution. There is no more legacy. What I mean by that,

Anthony, is if you created a solution today Uncork, and tomorrow there's a holographic interface for you to interact with your bank. When we create that one interface in a holographic device, you automatically got it with no change to your application. So we moved all customers over from Angular to React because React was better performance to the client. Not a single customer knew it even occurred for the first time. That project in a bank guaranteed is $20 million and it fails every time. We moved all customers from Docker to Kubernetes behind the scenes to do and better deployments faster. No one knew it even occurred. It's just invisible. So we could migrate customers in one fell swoop to the latest technology, some more legacy, I look back at what's

happening today in corporations. And I think about robotics, RPA. And it's a technology that's been around for 20 years. It's putting a layer on top of the technology that's there, the legacy, and saying, let's push it under the cover further and pretend it's okay. So I'm hoping in 25 years, there's no more legacy. That's what my wish for the world would be. You know what? Companies need to start being, their stock price should be evaluated based on how quickly they address legacy technology, because it will impact that stock price guaranteed in five years or 10 years if they just simply keep hiding it behind technology instead of addressing it. Are we at a point now where basically everyone has to have a no-code strategy? I talk a lot in

the crypto world, it's like everyone needs a Bitcoin strategy. Is it now that every corporation needs a no-code strategy. So it's so funny. You want any boards? I got to ask. You must be. A few. But a few. So as a CIO who used to present to public boards, I could tell you what's happening right now is the boards are starting to ask their CEO and their leadership team, so what are you doing about this low-code, no-code space, which popped up? And it's, what are we doing there? And what the technologists who I will call, So I'm going to call them more technologists who are more worried about their job than they are worried about the shareholders and the customer.

We'll basically very quickly look to pick a solution in that space, which enables them to continue doing what they're doing today, which is code. So they'll look for a solution that lets them inject their code in that system. And Anthony, the best way to say it in cloud computing, which everyone knows cloud and the idea behind it, it would it's basically like me taking an old server from downstairs that's 10 year old dell server with 20 you know 32 core cpu and it's a great server but i'm going to pick it up and drive it to amazon's data center and ask them to rack it for me in their cloud and no one would ever do that no one would ever think like if i give them this server could they rack it for me i know there's no spare parts it's going to break it's going to be insecure it can't be patched

can't be supported. No one knows how to support it. It won't be compliant or compatible. Why would I ever do that? And yet that's exactly what we're doing today when we take our code and host it in someone else's software. It's exactly the same thing. Here's my legacy code. Go put it in your legacy environment. So when you think about what's happening today in that space, to me at the board level, they're saying, yes, what are we doing here? We're seeing technologists select software that keeps them employed more than changes the company and revolution. We had a client yesterday They go, I could keep with my incumbent low-code provider, a CRM tool, and I could keep with that, or I could choose Uncork and revolutionize the business.

That's the difference. And I love the conversation. I love the battle there. And with that, I would simply ask the business, anyone listening from the business to your podcast, I would simply say, ask the question. Simply ask the technologists, number one, if we choose that solution, is it going to upgrade automatically to the latest technology, or are we going to have legacy tomorrow here? That's it.

One simple question. And there's only one technology at the end of that that doesn't, which is us. So it's pretty cool to be in that spot. It's a good question for you, then, if they ask. It's a good question for me. We're going to try. Yeah. I mean, Anthony, the other question, which I love is, you know, board members, if you

think about how businesses get compensated or like product managers get compensated, it's based on delivery. It's based on outcome. It's based on value. If you think about technologists, at least historically, what I've witnessed is technologists are compensated based on a budget size. How many people work for you? How big is your budget? Is the more money you personally make at the end of the year bonus? It's exactly contrary to productivity and efficiency. And it has nothing to do with value. So if we change the way we

actually compensate to say it's based on your value, bring the company, technologists will stop trying to hire engineers for the sake of headcount and budget size. That's kind of where, so it's my own belief there. That's a personal belief that I've seen in the past. I'd love to see change. Makes sense to me. Before I let you go, I ask everyone the same three questions and then you have to ask me one to finish up.

The first is what's the most important book that you've ever read? So, I mean, look, enjoyable book is Ready Player One, just because I love the 80s and I love the idea that that was the whole book premise. But as far as a book recommended, I do like Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric. I just, you know, this idea that every day we're actually going to wake up and there's going to be a new problem to solve, make the game about problem solving. make it fun to solve problems, make it so that we actually, that's, it's actually what life is about is solving problems, solving puzzles. My mornings, my morning start off with me doing

Kenton or Sudoku at the hardest level possible, just to basically say, my brain's going to get a little bit activated. And I know that it might not solve the problem. I might have to give up, but I'm going to try my best to do it. And I'll try again tomorrow. If I don't. I love it. Next question is brought to you by our friends over at eight sleep. I sleep five or six hours. Now I sleep on their thermoregulated bed. I turn it basically as cold as I possibly can, like an ice cube, sleep eight or nine hours. And they have fully converted me to this like sleep religion and how important it is. What is your sleep schedule and how has that changed over time? So when I created Uncorked, I probably wasn't doing that. I was probably doing about

two or three hours a night of sleep. And I do remember those well. And of course, with three kids, you remember those days also. I could tell you I am a six to eight guy. So I need a minimum of six and max eight if it's more than eight i don't feel great and i need that coffee in the morning if it's six i'm kind of okay and seven is probably my max number i do one thing as a routine though anthony so i mentioned ken ken in the morning like to me i'm candy crush right before bed because there's no game you could basically reset your brain than candy crush where you don't have to think and it's probably the best life lessons in candy crush which is you know it's about luck it's about trying the same thing over and over again you're gonna basically go insane

this definition goes if you keep thinking it's going to get a different result every time you try something it's definition of insanity and uh and you know it's basically just something to watch things explode which is nothing wrong with that before going to bed i love it last question you get asked me one is uh aliens are you a believer or non-believer believer and non-believer i i have to believe that we are not the only civilization out there um at all so absolutely and i would be excited by one day being able to see that there are are they coming down to earth I can't see why they'd be here. They'd be here with masks and COVID right now. So why would we ever, but absolutely believe that we are not the only civilization for sure. What do you, Anthony,

go ahead. And that question, I got to hear. Oh, I'm definitely a believer. I don't know if we're going to see them, but for sure, we definitely are not the only intelligent life in probably our galaxy, let alone all the other galaxies. What is your favorite book? Can I ask? So favorite is probably a little bit different. I always say like the three most impactful books for me were a rich dad, poor dad, richest man in Babylon and thinking grow rich. But those were more like personal finance type books that I read when I was younger. Uh, now I would say that, um, by the most important book and most impactful book, I almost think of it as like the Bible of investing is, uh, the Dow of capital, uh, written by, uh, Mark Spitznagel. So I wouldn't say

a great one. I'm going to go order that. I haven't heard that. That's an awesome one. Very cool. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. This is tons of fun. Absolutely. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Uncork? Yeah. So uncork.com, U-N-Q-O-R-K.com. And just so you know, it's not a wine company. We disappointed a lot of investors early on. You can imagine we're walking in to do the pitch and they're like, wait, you're not consumer goods. You're not. And so we were all about uncorking the competitive advantage that lies in great companies. So we don't compete with you. We enable you to basically do better at uncork. We couldn't afford the C, which was half a million dollars to buy the domain.

And instead it was a $14.95 purchase at GoDaddy. And that's kind of where we are. And of course, everyone's welcome. Look me up on LinkedIn. I would love it. Connect with me on LinkedIn and you'll find me there. Awesome. Awesome, Gary.

Listen, thank you so much for doing this. You guys have built an amazing company. I'm a big fan. So keep it up and we'll do it again in the future. Can't wait. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks again. Have a great day.